Torture-to-death, advanced stomach cancer, radiation sickness, suicidal depression? You, or some web-based crackpots you know of, would willingly endure these?
I argue that the reality is neurophysical. But that is still arbitrary.
Actually, I misinterpreted this a little in my last post. I am saying that there is always an “ah, yes, but what about…” example which shows a given morality model to be a ‘best guess’ rather than an inviolate law. I am suggesting that the “world would be a better place” with less suffering as defined according to some medical criteria. Just because one might, somewhere, find a fellow who volunteers to have his legs chopped off does not, I hope, prevent us from minimising the amount of leg-chopping-off which goes on.
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Torture-to-death, advanced stomach cancer, radiation sickness, suicidal depression? You, or some web-based crackpots you know of, would willingly endure these?
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Let me be very clear about this. NOT ME! I know you did not mean this in quite this way.
No, not really. Remember your mention of the voluntary nature of such injuries. You suggested that adding voluntaryness to the situation might alter the moral judgement. I’m not trying to say that this proves there is no objective way to measure pain. It simply makes your system not internally consistent. As always, I may be misunderstanding.
Dag blamed coding. I hope you can read that.
Only insofar as they act as a marker for quantitative considerations of whether they really warrant the term ‘suffering’, ie. that they cannot be all that intolerable if they are willingly submitted to. I did not suggest that they introduce some qualitative shift.
Then any morality is just as inconsistent, and seeking agreement on the least flawed is an utterly hopeless endeavour. There is always such a freak or contrived counter to any position in so complex and, dare I say it, human a field as morality.
We must seek agreement where we can, and move from there. I contend that extreme physical agony is undesirable and should be minimised. That would seem to be an altogether reasonable origin.
Sorry to have jumped threads on you. I missed your response. Too distracted by those darn “7 minute” threads.
Well, I’m not so sure. This certainly seems to be a qualitative shift. Before you were saying that medical measurements could determine suffering. Now you seem to be saying that even in the face of such a measurement, a voluntary element would alter the determination of “suffering” or anoyance.
Well, no. A system is internall consistent if all of the concepts used are always used in the same way, and if they do not form any self negating conclusions. It seems to me that you are using the word suffering in different ways. You seem to be postulating a medically provable amount of suffering which could form the basis for a morality. But you also don’t seem to be using this “medically verifiable suffering” to mean the same thing morally when an element of voluntary participation is present by the sufferer.
I think we might be able to define certain instances of suffering that we could all agree need to be minimized. But we might not be able to agree on a more general principle regarding all types of suffering. For instance take all of the forms of suffering you think should be minimized, limit them to those caused in some substantial way by another person, and I’ll probably agree with you. This still leaves you to convince me, if you will, that accidental or voluntary suffering rises to this standard, but it is a starting point.
The problem with this approach, of course, is that without more general principles such a moral system might be useless in many situations.
From this thread
Ok, but do you have any evidence that these could be used as a measurement of “suffering”. I don’t mean technically measuring the level of them. I mean that they are related to suffering and not other things. Specifically, I’m concerned that you may be puttin too much faith in them regarding the experience of suffering. Is it not possible for people to experience suffering and yet to show vastly different levels of these chemicals?
I guess I’m asking for a more definitive coralation than the wikipedia article suggests. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding it.
For the sake of semantics, I would use “morality” to refer to subjective ideas of justice, which are human constructs; & “justice” to refer to an objective reality of good, which may or may not exist. I just learned to do this recently, & think this is clearer.
I would say that justice exists. Others contend that it does not. Either way, morality, as believed in by an individual, is subjective.
No, I repeat: voluntary submission is just a helpful marker - it is not an inviolate principle and it need not introduce any qualitative shift. A person who has set fire to himself (for whatever reason) is still suffering and “the good” is being served by ameliorating it.
Yet again, I say: voluntariness is merely a helpful quantitative marker, but a voluntary action can still result in genuine suffering.
Excellent - I think we now at least have a basis for progress. As I have admitted all along, the less extreme and obvious the suffering becomes, the more other factors must be balanced (such as whether its prevention is actually feasible). As I have also admitted all along, I am a social liberal: one should be allowed to risk personal harm under informed consent and, yes, some of those risks might engender genuine suffering. But life would be sorely dull otherwise, perhaps even verging on Orwellian dystopia, and such oppression and tyranny surely engenders suffering itself given the ensuing stress, depression and even violent revolution.
Beyond those obvious medical and clinical characteristics of a suffering person which we both agree on, it clearly is a difficult equation, no doubt about it. We must ask ourselves whether prevention of certain suffering is feasible, and whether such a measure engenders suffering itself (via, say, some utility being vastly diminished). But throughout the “computation”, I simply find it extremely difficult to bear seeing someone in medical or clinical distress and would always seek to exhaust the feasible options for ameliorating their suffering before admitting that it is unavoidable. A wealthy democracy has a great deal of scope for addressing the suffering of its people. Indifference to that suffering is, I feel, unjust and oppressive (the very opposites of liberty and justice which other moralities appeal to).
Indeed - I admit again that there are always tricky individual cases to be contrived. We must seek a reasonable approach to what state of mental anguish can realistically be called ‘suffering’ - a person mildly annoyed that an election didn’t go their way simply cannot be compared with a person who cries several times daily and has suicidal tendencies, and their respective stress and neurotransmitter depletion levels reflect this. I have luckily led a very happy life, but would not wish those couple of episodes of massive stress and feelings of imminent full nervous breakdown upon my worst enemy. I was suffering then in a way which made physical agony seem positively desirable, and I’m quite sure that my brain would ‘say’ as much under clinical investigation. (Of course, as a physicalist I contend that all experiences are derived from physical brain function as dependent on physical environment and essentially deny “free will” as a mere calculation, but that’s another thread.)
Ok, but it still seems like your saying that two people experiencing the same level of pain could be differentiated by the voluntaryness of the activity. That is one could be said to be suffering (below this morally imperitive threshold) while the other was suffering above it.
And perhaps the injustices necessary to address them?
You would allow people to inflict suffering in order to prevent suffering? 
Fair enough. You keep saying that it should be possible to make an objective measure, but so long as you are not claiming that such a measure in available now, or that it is imminent, I’ll agree to disagree.
Of course. I think this also, I simply come at it from another angle.
Ok, but this makes another difficulty possible. What if some experience you feel is clearly suffering does not measure up to the medical definition? There are bound to be such cases. Also, what about cases which you do not feel are suffereing which nonetheless do measure up to such a medical suffereing assesment.
Capital punishment can be illustrative in this regard. We have moved from haning, to shooting, to electricution or gassing to lethal injections. In some ways the experience has not gotten any better for the executed (not really going to cite anything as I’m not trying tohijack this thread). However, what has gotten better is the witnesses experience. We went from public hangings to tightly controled witnesses, at the same time we went pregressively less violent forms of death. They are definately less messy. But they may, in fact, induce more suffering.
The point I’m trying to make is that decisions made as a group must focus on percieved suffering. They will necessarily miss many instances of experienced suffering, and they may in fact ascribe suffeering to experiences which are not.
Ok, but I don’t think anyone is talking about indifference.
They may, but I’m not so sure. I think the experience of suffering can be driven by past learning. The brain, in other words may learn what levels of chemicals to produce differently from person to person. I’m not sure we can say for sure that a given experience will always produce a given level of some chemical.
That is indeed possible. I believe, however, that people can experience the exact same things and interpret them entirely differently. If the mind lives in the brain, this has to be because differentthe brains can respond to the same events differently. The vast diversity of human experience leads me to believe that these differences might be enough to ruin forever the hope of some objective “suffering meter”.
Indeed. 3 or 4 hijacks are enough for one day.
Thank you very much for the discussions. They have very valuable to me.
I think you might be mischaracterising my position a little, perv, or at least vastly oversimplifying it. I am not suggesting that we might take some nationwide PET scan, calculate some overall pain/stress reading and dust off our hands at a job well done: morality, sorted.
All I am suggesting is that the worst that people feel, the most undesirable states of mind, the most intolerable anguish and stress which people experience, is not some elusive and utterly subjective metaphysical entity but is actually pretty plain to see, even without reference to fundamental neuroscience. Of all the words I’ve used, the word “suffering” is the one you’ve trained your rhetorical microscope upon (understandably, of course), and yet if your mother telephoned you tonight to tell you that your auntie was really suffering with her cancer, grief, bankruptcy or nervous breakdown, I’m sure you wouldn’t require a philosophical dialogue to establish what she meant. It does not just mean inconvenience, annoyance or a sprained ankle, it means life’s very worst episodes which you simply would never, ever wish to go through again.
Now, of course some people can bear a great deal more than others before they are reduced to such misery - some event or situation might well cause greater or lesser suffering in a sample group. But yet again I say that we ought not throw out a given model based solely on singular cases, but think rather more holistically and statistically. Sure, a given policy might cause great upset and anxiety in some, while some bore such an ill with great fortitude. But discarding a consideration of the whole by focussing on certain individuals is like ignoring the weather forecast because of a zephyr.
I do not know how to explain myself any more clearly. I will endeavour yet again upon request.
Certainly, since I consider genuiune suffering, in a land of plenty having such scope to address it, as an injustice itself.
Your winky smilie hopefully expresses agreement that such balancing acts are anything but simple.
I suggest that it is possible to gauge physical pain and mental distress in an individual via clinical investigation. Using that to provide a measure of suffering overall is something we can only pursue by asking what is reasonable, not by producing a magic number, however approximate.
I think I have addressed this same point at least four times now.
We could take an entire thread in any specific application of my general principle. Like I said, there’s always tricky cases.
The notion of suffering I suggest as a starting point to ameliorate the ‘worst first’ would, I believe, miscategorise in not many cases: do you have advanced cancer or not? Are you in physical pain or not? Are you having a nervous breakdown or not? I agree that there is scope for misdiagnosis, but not in the form of an utter lottery.
I’m afraid this is such a gargantuan oversimplification of neuroscience and cognitive psychiatry that I’m not sure we’re really having the same argument on this point.
Like I said, looking at the causes of such suffering must be done rather more holistically. I am merely commenting on those neurophysiological characteristics of people who are suffering that stress and depression: of course the ‘suffering meter’ says nothing about its cause - again, we must ask ourselves whether there is a reasonable, feasible approach to alleviating it.
They are valueable to me too. I’m not by any means suggesting I have it ‘all worked out’. Suggest another model of morality, and I’ll have a go at it. We can see what’s left in the crucible.
I agree that I am oversimlifying. I don’t mean to mischaracterize it. I’m really just trying to understand.
This sets it out more clearly.
Let me try this from another angle. In the socialized medicine thread, you mentioned prioritizing one person’s suffering above another’s money. What I’m trying to get at, is where you draw the line such that some person’s suffering overides another persons freedom, or implies some level of injustice to you. More specifically, when does one person’s suffering allow him to use force against another in order to alleviate said suffering. I suppose I’ve been dancing around the question in an effort to understand.
It seems to me that you have raised suffering too high in your hierarchy of morals. I can understand if you think that an obviously dieing person should be helped. But this seems to me to be an emergency sort of coningency. Not very helpful in determining day to day activities.
I agree that certain experiences could be agreed on as “genuine suffering”. I agree that reducing these overall is a laudible goal. I do not, however, agree that such considerations should rise higher in an individuals morality than his own welfare, or his own life. For such an individual to make helping others part of his life is one thing. For such aid to be forced is, IMO quite another. I think you have raised suffering in others to such a level in your moral hierarchy that you are not making a sufficient distinction between these two cases.
I did try to set out the beginings of one earlier in the thread. I have tried to apply it to our discussion. How did I do?
I am arguing that a system of government in which, for whatever reason, millions of people who “lose the Game of Life” end up falling through enormous holes in the safety net engenders more suffering than a universal model. I do not find the distinction you propose at all convincing, ie. that one is “forced” only to address suffering caused by arbitrary specific sources - the ‘positive/negative rights’ idea. Protection from crime must be forcibly supplied by someone else. Why not from other sources of suffering?
Again, however, we are now discussing my proposed morality model as relating to a very specific application - we could pretty much choose any and hog a whole thread thus.
You mean the ‘liberty and justice’ model? OK, let’s examine it as you have examined mine. I proposed an essentially medical/clinical metric whereby the presence suffering in an individual could be verified according to obsevable neurological criteria. So, some questions for starters:[ul][li]Define ‘liberty’.[/li][li]How can it be gauged or observed?[/li][li]Why is liberty particularly ‘good’ and its absence particularly ‘bad’ (especially if ‘free will’ is itself so utterly elusive from a scientific perspective)? [/li]What’s so wrong with me randomly assaulting people for fun (or any other coercion for that matter)?[/ul]
It is almost certainlty not within the scope of this thread, but it seems to me you have simply replaced the dubious “suffering” with the even more dubious “Losers of the Game of Life”. This term could apply to even more people who I do not think you want it to. Ken Lay, for instance, could be considered a loser.
But this misses my point entirely. I am not proposing forcing anyone to do anything. You are.
Well, I think I used the life of the individual as the standard of morality, but for our purposes here, I think liberty and justice will do. Subject to some clarifications, of course.
Yes, but without starting this all over again, you have not done a very good job ofdefining when such measurements qualify and when they do not. More to the point, I am not proposing a number by which morality can be measured. I suggest that it is a much more qualitative characteristic of reality than that.
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[ul][li]Define ‘liberty’.[/li][li]How can it be gauged or observed?[/li][li]Why is liberty particularly ‘good’ and its absence particularly ‘bad’ (especially if ‘free will’ is itself so utterly elusive from a scientific perspective)? [/li][li]What’s so wrong with me randomly assaulting people for fun (or any other coercion for that matter)?[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
The Onelook dictionary gives me:[ul][li]freedom of choice (Example: “Liberty of opinion”) [/li][li]personal freedom from servitude or confinement or oppression [/li][li]immunity from arbitrary exercise of authority: political independence[/ul][/li]
It seems to me the first definition is too broad, the second is too narrow, and the third is only slightly less narrow but comes closest. For my purposes, I’ll define liberty as that state wherein a person is free to choose his actions without force. Stated this way, the principle applies to more than merely the current advanced society in which we find ourselves. It applies equally (as a moral virtue) to other sorts of human interactions, and to some extent to individual actions as well.
I’m not sure that it is necessary to guage liberty. One only needs to guage its absence. That is, the goal of a society, or government, is not to maximize liberty, necessarily, as it is to minimize the violation of liberties.
Liberty is a virtue, or high on the hiearchy of morality because it is necessary for a human to live life as a human. I always like the way milton put it, “It is better to reign in hell than to be a slave in heaven.”
Your last question is answered quite simply by asking “What is wrong with others randomly assualting me?”
I would suggest that it is not dubious whether or not you are suffering from a specific, preventable medical condition whose remedy you find you cannot pay for. I am proposing a metric whereby people do not actually die of poverty. (Indeed, a private charity could very well use such a metric in its determination of ‘who to help’ - does it’s very raison d’etre crumble upon your inspection?)
Who? What is his plight?
And how is crime prevention to be paid for? Voluntarily? What if nobody volunteers? Surely taxation to fund crime prevention is forcing me to prevent crime?
And how do we do that, exactly? More importantly, if I was sceptical of its very existence and labelled it “dubious”, how would you convince me otherwise?
Why are such violations a bad thing?
My answer is that it causes me to suffer, as incidicated by physiological stress and pain responses. What’s your answer?
Yes, I understand your intention. It is not the result of your proposal, however. Much of the “death by poverty” occurs because poor people engage in risky behaviors (smoking and drinking for instance) to a larger extent than others. Others of it occurs because of less sumptuous housing, rarely because of a complete lack of housing. Still less of it occurs because of bad higene. But poverty itself occurs far more because of decisions made early in life than it does because the rest of us desire to keep the money we earn.
I’m not casting aspersions. I am not trying to blame poor people for being poor. I am simply pointing out that the real remedies for poverty have less to do with universal health care and more to do with the entrepenurial spirit.
I did not follow this.
Ken Lay. You know, Enron. He’s going to jail, or at least is likely to.
Well, I think I can formulate a voluntary revnue stream which just might pay for the criminal justice system. Simply charge people for enforcing contracts. A small few of a few percentage points on any contract which the parties want backed up by the legal system. Contracts could still be entered into and executed without the fee, but they would not be enforcible in court.
Ah, but there’s the rub, isn’t it. I would not convince you at all. If you choose to live your life as if you had no liberty, I would honor that choice. So long as you do not try to force it on anyone else, you are free to doubt the existence of liberty, air or even yourself.
Violations of liberty by force are anathema to the proper interaction between reasoning human beings. They are the only sorts of interactions which negate the possibility of reason as the means to such interactions, and thus are the only sorts which are not human.
There is no universal morality that we can discover. (The last few pages are a huge diversion into why evolution doesn’t provide a basis for morality, even if it may have been the ultimate cause of its coming about, but the OP is quite nice if I do say so myself.) Faith in God, objective existence, or moral-making fairies does not guarantee there will not be a plurality of systems that can only be argued by adopting a particular system in the first place, thus begging the question of moral foundationalism.
We can construct an inter-subjective system of agreement and reference many components to objective criteria, i.e. utilitarianism with a focus on consequences, but this no more guarantees a “best case” than English is a “best language”.
I agree with pervert that life is the context in which morality operates; but we disagree that in general the furtherance of life is the aim of moral systems. It may be the aim of his moral system.
What I was trying to suggest is that life is an activity high in the priority of any life form. That is, life is not necessarily the aim of an abstract morality. However morality as a hierarchical method of defining priorities for a life form must include the life of that life form somewhere high up within it. What a thing is determines (to some degree anyway) what it aught to do.
Morality is a human construct. And it is only appilcable by humans onto other humans.
Worded clearly might not be that.
A gun is morally neutral. A bullet being fired out of a gun is morally neutral. A person whose finger pulled the trigger and caused the bullet to be fired out of the gun is morally neutral.
It is only when another person witnesses the actions and consequences of the person firing the gun that a moral judgement can be made. And the person who witnessed the event is the only person that can make the moral judgement about said event.
That being the case, all moral judgements are subjective (at least that’s the way I see it). No matter how well reasoned an argument you give me to saying that firing the gun was right, I guarantee I can give you an argument that is just as well reasoned that firing it was wrong.
Morality is never applicable in a vacuum. You can’t simply say some things are right and some thing are wrong. And that those rules are set in stone never to change.
Ah, but more correctly stated would be it is only applicable to oneself. That is, a given morality held by a given human is applied to himself. His morality might dictate his interactions with “other humans”. But it will dictate his actions, not those of any others.
Yes, slightly less yes, and finally no. The first one does not require the context of any human actors. The second one requires some sort of actor although I can imagine some sort of automatic firing mechanism. The last one, however, requires the existence of a human actor (unless we are talking about zombies). The only way to postulate that the last one is morally neutral is to drop the context of this human actor.
Again, not at all. The person firing the gun, presumably, is quite capable of making moral judgements on his own actions. In fact, I’d suggest that any other person would be making such a moral judgement based on how he would judge himself in the commission of such an act.
Right or wrong is not the point in the context of this thread. The point I think you were trying to make is that morality is not based on individual judgements, but on the subjective observations of others. I think I have shown that not to be the case.
Having done so, I will agree with your last paragraphs to a degree. The moral judgements of any given individuals may in fact differ. For many situations, it may be very difficult indeed to determine with any objectivity which choice is moral and which is not. I think this is what you mean, ultimately, when you say that morality is subjective.
But it is precisely because morality is not applicable in a vacuum that you can say that some things are always right and some are always wrong. The caveat I already mentioned that some situations are quite difficult indeed to decide, does not mean that all situations are difficult to decide.
If you will allow me to wax hyperbolic for a second to illustrate my point.
Morality is not applicable in a vacuum. It applies only to a specific type of things and only in specific type of situations. As we have been discussing in this thread, morality applies only to life forms capable of making choises. It is, in fact, one tool for making such choices. In the case of humans, we can say that a morality which promotes doogling the draculator* over living a comfortable life is inferior to one which does not.
*I’m using nonsense words to illustrate the point that human morality has to apply to humans. Morality which do not are demonstrably inferior to those which do. It should be obvious that humans do not have draculators and that we have not way of doogling them.