That’s a fair cop. It would have been better to have talked about all things that are “known form experience” than that “can be measured”.
I don’t think empiricists claim that “all truths are empirical”–only synthetic truths or truths about the world. No one denies that things that are true only by the definition of the words used are true without regard to any empirical fact. “All bachelors are unmarried men are” and “Take the sentence ‘all truths are empirical’: it purports to be true, but it surely isn’t empirical, so it’s self-negating. So there are some truths that aren’t empirical.” are both true a priori.
OK, fine. To me, there seems to be a lot of ground between the two, though. The latter seems to be open to a lot more and different sorts of entities—I don’t know any principled reason, for instance, why I shouldn’t know objective moral facts in the same way I know the painfulness of my headache. I don’t, in that all I think is morally right also seems in principle defeasible to me, while nobody could argue me out of the painfulness of my headache, but I’m not sure things must be like that.
What about, for instance, ‘every a priori truth is analytic’? (That is, ‘there is no synthetic a priori’, pace Kant.) Its truth is not discoverable a posteriori—nothing in experience, it seems to me, would serve to determine its truth. But it’s also not analytic: the concept of a priori does not entail analyticity (as is witnessed by philosophers arguing about whether there are synthetic a priori truths). So if it were true, it would be a synthetic a priori truth—hence, again self-negating. So there’s some synthetic a priori truth, namely, at least this one—which is clearly not a posteriori, and clearly not analytic, yet if the argument is right, true, and knowably so. Although I have to admit that this seems a bit suspiciously simple…
We may lack the instruments to measure headaches, but the phenomenon we experience as a headache is ultimately the result of physical processes that could be measured.
The fact that trying to measure them might destroy the patient is a moot point - ‘measurability’ is about the fact that some piece of the physical universe is distinctly doing something, or being somewhere.
The fact that measuring the physical processes causing a headache doesn’t allow you to capture a ‘headache in a jar’ is also moot. Measuring the length of something doesn’t get you ‘inches in a jar’; it yields a number. The measurement of a thing is not usually the thing, it is merely the detection of the thing.
Even if you could measure the brain state that encoded a sense of morality that wouldn’t necessarily mean that the measurement reflects an objective truth that doesn’t exist. Brain states include all sorts of erroneous information about the perceived world.
You could certainly measure some phenomenon that’s reliably correlated with certain pains, such as certain sets of C-fibers firing a certain way. But then suppose you encounter a creature (perhaps alien or artificial) that doesn’t even have C-fibers, so your pain-o-meter stays silent. I don’t think it’s reasonable to conclude that hence, that creature feels no pain. But if it does, then the pain-o-meter doesn’t actually measure pain.
But I think the point is rather that we don’t need to measure our pain to know we experience it. So there are ways of knowing that don’t boil down to measuring things. So hence, any argument to the effect that there’s no objective morality because we can’t measure it must be lacking.
That seems a weird argument to me. Lots of things aren’t tangible objects but nonetheless exist; they exist in an abstract or indirect sense.
e.g. outside of the IT crowd, there is no object that is the internet. We can point to a network of servers as being the internet, but in fact you could destroy lots of them and still have the internet. Heck, you could destroy all of them by moving infrastructure over. But who would dispute that the internet exists?
Anyway, that’s a bit of a nitpick.
My own view is that morality is indeed an individual and social construct, but that doesn’t make it arbitrary. Its underpinnings are fundamentally human needs, as well abstract concepts like constructive versus destructive actions. A lot of the goals of our morals and ethics often overlap, and so the rights and wrongs of particular actions can be something we can develop a better understanding with over time. This isn’t the same thing as changing our minds due to “fashion” or the flip of a coin.
Sure, if you encounter a thing that works differently from things you’ve seen before, then assumptions based on experience might break down. That’s a point about not knowing how to measure a thing, that would be measurable if you knew the right method.
I don’t think that follows, since the experience of pain is a subjective phenomenon. We can measure the biological causes of pain objectively, empirically, or we can experience it subjectively; when you experience pain, you’re not tapping into some shared universal platonic ideal that has existence of its own. Its entirely possible that the biological processes that cause the experience of pain in one person might for one reason or another, fail to cause pain in another, or cause pleasure, or something else.
Well, would you look at at that: Quite by coincidence, today Wikipedia serves me up, as “today’s featured article”, a page on the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument, to the effect that we should accept the reality of numbers, sets and other abstractions because they are indispensable to science.
The argument is not without its opponents, but the fact that it’s an ongoing argument at all does underline my point that science neither requires philosophical materialism nor validates it, and it turns out that at least some thinkers evidently consider science to be incompatible with philosophical materialism.
Numbers, sets, etc are quite different from ethical principles, but if we accept that numbers or sets can be real then we cannot assert that ethical principles cannot real purely because they have no material existence.
I don’t know, seems to me if your length measuring device measures length only on wooden items, it’s not really measuring length at all. Or perhaps more aptly, if you build a fire detector that measures smoke, and which stays silent on smokeless fires, you’ve really built a smoke detector. You’re relying on some sort of proxy for measuring a phenomenon, but that shouldn’t be conflated with measuring that thing as such.
Sure, but I’m not trying to get knowledge about the biological processes, but about pain. And that I can do without measurement; hence, it’s not just measurement that allows us to obtain knowledge, there’s at least also the knowledge we have of our experience. So any argument that has as a premise that knowledge can only be obtained via measurement is unconvincing.
Now, it might be that it’s only experiential phenomena that can be known non-empirically, and that morality isn’t such a phenomenon, nor productive of such a phenomenon, in which case, that wouldn’t help. But this requires additional argument. (And one could point then to mathematical truths that are also, by most lights, non-empirical, yet appear to be objective.)
Smoke can be measured; fire can be measured; choose what you want to measure, then measure it.
Pain seems like a poor example for anything anyone is trying to assert in this thread. Sure you know you’re experiencing pain, but experience is subjective. Objective morality that is actually subjective, is not objective at all.
Is the argument about ethical principles, which I can easily accept as being real, or the specific set of ethical principles making up an objective morality?
I suspect if you push back those who claim to subjectively know an objective morality exists will admit that they don’t. If they’re honest, that is.
Numbers (let’s say the set of positive integers) could be discovered by aliens, or by ants, or dolphins, or whatever, and they would be the same numbers that humans have discovered; they would function in the same way.
Can the same be said about principles of morality or ethics? If they were discovered on a planet on the other side of the galaxy, by alien ant-dolphins who evolved intelligence, but not like ours, and a social structure that is so wholly different from ours that humans would compulsively vomit just trying to comprehend it, would there be any commonality with the ethics and morality we have ‘discovered’?
I mean, I suppose you could say that even if it was different, ours was something we discovered about ourselves, that was scoped to humans, owing to the way we evolved, but that’s just like saying there is some deep objective truth about being two-legged or five-fingered. Sure, it’s how we are, and it’s measurable, but so what?
I would say even if they can’t be discovered in the same way doesn’t mean morality can’t be objective. I know this can be dismissed as mere practicality rather than evidence of morality being objective but I highly doubt that outside of fiction you could find any kind of actual society that didn’t have basic moral beliefs remotely like ours. Basic beliefs like the value of life, it’s wrong to hurt people for no good reason, it’s wrong to lie and betray people for your own gain, it’s good to help others etc. There’s a reason why even the most monstrous societies in history still executed, imprisoned or exiled the likes of Bundy, Whitman, Dahmer, Dillinger etc. A society that didn’t have any kind of benevolent moral principles whatsoever would never form in the first place and they’d be stuck in a state of complete anarchy and bloodshed. You’d be describing a nightmare realm of demons and psychopaths rather than real world biological entities that could feasibly exist and build a functioning civilization.
As I said above, a society built by super-intelligent ants might have a very, very different view of individuality, the value of life (of the drones or workers or whatever), etc. I don’t know why you discount what fiction can add to this – science fiction in particular is a great way think about how different beings might set up their own, completely different, morality framework.
If people were some sort of hive mind, like the Borg, then they wouldn’t necessarily care about individuals at all. Intelligent, but non-social, species may care more about territory than murder.
You say so, but so far, you’ve only described how to measure smoke, not fire. Indeed, I rather think the idea of measuring experiential states is a conceptual confusion: it’s our knowledge of them that makes any measurement possible in the first place. I know what my smoke detector reads because I have an experience of that smoke detector, which I know the same direct way I know any experience, without the intermediary of measurement. Otherwise, I’d just be stuck in an infinite regress of measurements; experience is what grounds this.
Sure, but that leaves us in no worse a way than we are with respect to anything supposedly objective. All knowledge of the outside world is subjective and might be nothing more than a hallucination, or the machinations of some Cartesian demon. If anything, then non-empirical knowledge, like knowledge about numbers, seems way more reliable in such a scenario.