Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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GE Morton
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by GE Morton »

Hereandnow wrote: June 9th, 2019, 9:16 am
How are statements about absolutes different from relative, or contingent ones? To be an absolute, something has to be a stand alone condition, not in any way bound to context, as is the case with good couches and bad martinis.
This sounds like the flip side of the discussion in another thread, re: subjective v. objective.

Those two dichotomies (absolute/relative and objective/subjective) are constantly confused. So it may be worth while to define those four terms.

In philosophy, both dichotomies denote properties of propositions ("absolute truths," "subjective truths," etc.), though they all have other meanings in other contexts. I take their meanings to be as follows:

"Absolute": a proposition which cannot possibly be false. The only absolute truths are tautologies, e.g., "All triangles have 3 sides," "All bachelors are unmarried," etc. The truth of all other propositions depends upon contingent facts about the world. So they are relative to a given universe of discourse.

"Relative": As noted, a proposition whose truth depends upon contingent facts about the world.

""Objective": A proposition whose truth conditions are public, i.e., anyone suitably situated may determine whether they obtain or not.

"Subjective": A proposition whose truth conditions are private, and only accessible to the speaker.

Note that all absolute propositions are objective, but relative propositions may be objective or subjective.

Note also that all four properties assume that the meanings of the terms used in the propositions are understood and agreed upon by all parties to the discussion. E.g., everyone understands "bachelor" to mean an unmarried man.
. . . all contingent ethical propositions come down to this since relative goods beg the question of what could be called originary value: Couches can be assessed for their comfort, their look, their style, and so on; but these, once queried as to their value, reduce to taste and their objectivity is understood to be intersubjectivity, and this latter is just a generalization of individual taste.
You are confusing deontology (the theory of moral principles and rules) with axiology (theory of value). They have been commingled and confounded regularly in the history of philosophy. But if sense is to be ever be made of either they have to be distinguished and treated separately. Values are inherently subjective, and so no ethical principle based upon them can be objective. But ethical propositions can be objective if they are based instead on objective facts about the world and human nature. They will never be "absolute," however, since, though objectively true in this world, in a different world inhabited by different kinds of creatures they could be false.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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GE Morton

This sounds like the flip side of the discussion in another thread, re: subjective v. objective.

Those two dichotomies (absolute/relative and objective/subjective) are constantly confused. So it may be worth while to define those four terms.

In philosophy, both dichotomies denote properties of propositions ("absolute truths," "subjective truths," etc.), though they all have other meanings in other contexts. I take their meanings to be as follows:

"Absolute": a proposition which cannot possibly be false. The only absolute truths are tautologies, e.g., "All triangles have 3 sides," "All bachelors are unmarried," etc. The truth of all other propositions depends upon contingent facts about the world. So they are relative to a given universe of discourse.

"Relative": As noted, a proposition whose truth depends upon contingent facts about the world.

""Objective": A proposition whose truth conditions are public, i.e., anyone suitably situated may determine whether they obtain or not.

"Subjective": A proposition whose truth conditions are private, and only accessible to the speaker.

Note that all absolute propositions are objective, but relative propositions may be objective or subjective.

Note also that all four properties assume that the meanings of the terms used in the propositions are understood and agreed upon by all parties to the discussion. E.g., everyone understands "bachelor" to mean an unmarried man.
As to absolutes, one the one hand, I hold that no proposition can possess an absolute truth, not even tautologies and contradictions. A tautology could have this kind of nature only the language and logic I use can be objectively verified, and, as Kant said, that is simply not available to us.Even kant was aware that the sensuous intuitions as well as the insistence of reason itself were "givens" and possessed no external verification (even if it had this, it was Wittgenstein who said that that, too, that external basis for justifying reason's apodictic nature, would require justification, and so on.)
I simply do not think we can behold an absolute given the delimitations of what makes our world understandable. The study of hermeneutics presents a strong case that all of our terms and the logic through which the work are never to be taken as if, to put it as Levinas did, their totality could grasp eternity; eternity here indicating where language and its words simply run out, and inquiry faces its end. So, given that I don't understand how absolutes can every be put into truth bearing sentences, I have to qualify my position regarding ethics. Wittgenstein's brief Lecture on Ethics and John Mackie's Ethics: inventing Right and Wrong have been inspiring. I see ethics and aesthetics as having as their essential content what is transcendental. W. says ethics is not about what is factual and Mackie uses this to defend an anti-objectivist view:
The issue of the objectivity of values needs, however, to be distinguished from others with which it might be confused. To say that there are objective values would not be to say merely that there are some things which are valued by everyone, nor does it entail this. There could be agreement in valuing even if valuing is just something that people do, even if this activity is not further validated. Subjective agreement would give inter-subjective values, but intersubjectivity is not objectivity. Nor is objectivity simply universalizability: someone might well be prepared to universalize his prescriptive judgements or approvals – that is, to prescribe and approve in just the same ways in all relevantly similar cases, even ones in which he was involved differently or not at all – and yet he could recognize that such prescribing and approving were his activities, nothing more.

Mackie, J. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (pp. 22-23). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Mackie presents a thesis that "there are no ethical values," but his idea of objective is very strong. He is thinking specifically of Wittgenstein's standard of objectivity, not what mackie calls first order views where we find all of your definitions in place. We are here, quite outside first order moral decision making. Here, it is about the good and bad of ethical matters being grounded "in the fabric of the world" rather than in contexts in which things can be discussed, argued, compared, and so on.
As to my assertion that ethical is absolute, I am following Wittgenstein, though I am not convinced that ethical propositions as absolutes and nonsense;and i am denying Mackie's claim that ethical values are not objective in this absolute sense. I think ethical value is simply that: value' and value is understood int eh concrete as a spear through the kidney or falling in love. These present absolutes, the interpretation of which can never encompass the experience.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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Hereandnow wrote: June 9th, 2019, 9:30 pm
As to absolutes, one the one hand, I hold that no proposition can possess an absolute truth, not even tautologies and contradictions.
Well, then you're apparently relying on a different definition of "absolute" than the one I gave above: "A proposition which cannot possibly be false." There is no way a tautology can be false, or contradiction true. If you disagree, please provide an example.

"A tautology could have this kind of nature only the language and logic I use can be objectively verified . . ."

A language is not something that must, or can, be "verified." It is a convention. It needs no validation or verification beyond agreement among its users as to the meanings of its formulae. That a given term has a certain meaning is objectively verifiable, by observing whether the meaning in question is assumed by native speakers in their ordinary uses of the term.
. . .Kant was aware that the sensuous intuitions as well as the insistence of reason itself were "givens" and possessed no external verification . . .
Nor do they need any. For Kant the categories are inescapable, "built-in" principles and premises from which all conscious reasoning begins.
I simply do not think we can behold an absolute given the delimitations of what makes our world understandable. The study of hermeneutics presents a strong case that all of our terms and the logic through which the work are never to be taken as if, to put it as Levinas did, their totality could grasp eternity; eternity here indicating where language and its words simply run out, and inquiry faces its end.
Well, again you're assuming a different definition of "absolute" than the one I gave. I have no idea what "grasping eternity" might mean, or what a "totality" of language and logic would look like. If "absolute" somehow implies a "grasp of eternity," then the word is meaningless; it serves no useful function in the language. If no propositions are absolutely true, and there is no distinction to be made between "absolute" and "relative," then those two terms are superfluous.
I see ethics and aesthetics as having as their essential content what is transcendental.
Why? And if it is, then how can we grasp that content? To say that something is transcendental is to say that it is not apprehensible by us (such as Kant's noumena).
(quoting Mackie): The issue of the objectivity of values needs, however, to be distinguished from others with which it might be confused. To say that there are objective values would not be to say merely that there are some things which are valued by everyone, nor does it entail this. There could be agreement in valuing even if valuing is just something that people do, even if this activity is not further validated. Subjective agreement would give inter-subjective values, but intersubjectivity is not objectivity. Nor is objectivity simply universalizability: someone might well be prepared to universalize his prescriptive judgements or approvals – that is, to prescribe and approve in just the same ways in all relevantly similar cases, even ones in which he was involved differently or not at all – and yet he could recognize that such prescribing and approving were his activities, nothing more.
Mackie seems to making the common mistake of equating "objective" with "absolute." But value assignments are never objective, and certainly not absolute. That x has value V is meaningless unless a valuer is specified; it must have the form, x has value V to P. Note that the latter proposition is objective, because we can observe what value P attaches to x, by observing his behavior with respect to it.
I think ethical value is simply that: value' and value is understood int eh concrete as a spear through the kidney or falling in love. These present absolutes, the interpretation of which can never encompass the experience.
What meaning are you attaching to "absolute" there? And of course, the value assigned to a spear through the kidney or falling in love will vary from valuer to valuer, as with all other values. There is no valuer-independent means of assigning values to them.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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Hereandnow wrote: June 9th, 2019, 2:39 pm
Belindi
You answered your own question. Universal love is unlimited love ; universal love is not limited to circumstances.

A cosmological example of spatial absolutism is heliocentrism where the Sun is absolutely fixed and Earth moves relative to the Sun.

Politically , absolutists are those who believe that their own community's culture is absolutely the best for all times , places ,and other examples of cultures. Such people tend to be either extreme right wing or extreme left wing.
I'm not talking about loose talk grounded in univiersalizing something. Just qualify something as universal, and magically, the concept makes sense: it's just that thing and it applying to all. More serious attempts to absolutize something require making sense of something being an absolute at all; and it's not just that it is accidentally true for all of a class, but rather, here, it is true for, and I'll borrow the term, Being in eternity. It's as IF God made it so, but without God; it's like a commandment built into existence that cannot be violated, period.
Absolutes are tricky things because to make sense of it you have to conceive how we can know such a thing absolutely. to do this, you have show the distinction between mere contingent goods and bads, like good knives and chairs, and so on, and ethical goods and bads. These latter are impossible to demonstrate. For, as above, we can describe all that may go into something ethically bad, like torturing someone, but the ever elusive "badness" of the pain is like some platonic form of the Bad. Very difficult to posit such a thing and be held to a respectable standard verification and justification. After all, Show me the badness, the goodness of love, nt=ot just love, which is evident, but the goodness of it, as if love were God's love, but without God.
Like I said, I am on your side. I believe ethical goods and bads are absolutes. I say simply, as perhaps you do: the badness is worn on the sleeve of the event that stands before you. I is as evident as the color orange is to "orange" in common parlance.
But the problem arises, and it is a serious one, where your claim that X is absolutely bad, say, and you know this; you understand it. As we are capable as language and logic users to make language do this. that is a tall order. One has to look at what language is, and what we are. Absoluteness expressed in propositions?? How does one access the "truth" of it? Even mathematical ideas are difficult impossible to make into absolutes. Do they not depend on our rational constitution?
Universal love is as if " God made it so but without God" . This is naturalism which I agree with. Universal love, (and I quite understand Sculptor calling what i wrote hyperbole), is actually efficient like natural selection is efficient.
By universal love I mean trying to understand all that are affected by one's decisions, including oneself and one's relations and also people distant in space and future times, other animals, and the natural environment.Universal love is sometimes called caring not sentimentally but effectively. It's a tall order of course and nobody says it's easy or even entirely possible.It includes for instance choosing an ethical occupation and ethical money investments. It includes thinking and caring before you spray weedkiller. It includes trying not to use single use plastics. It includes taking care of yourself so you can be a better parent, nurse, or grocer. It includes studying ethics understood as the evaluation of moralities. Usually moral decisions made from the standpoint of universal love are relatively good decisions as we are all subject to the culture we inhabit.

There is no endpoint of universal love. Unlike the Sun and all other deities it's a moveable icon .

Universal love is all that can remain of moral heliocentrism. As most modern people would agree there is no longer one set of codified rituals or one supernatural deity, or one sacred myth that we tell ourselves and each other.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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Belindi
Universal love is as if " God made it so but without God" . This is naturalism which I agree with. Universal love, (and I quite understand Sculptor calling what i wrote hyperbole), is actually efficient like natural selection is efficient.
By universal love I mean trying to understand all that are affected by one's decisions, including oneself and one's relations and also people distant in space and future times, other animals, and the natural environment.Universal love is sometimes called caring not sentimentally but effectively. It's a tall order of course and nobody says it's easy or even entirely possible.It includes for instance choosing an ethical occupation and ethical money investments. It includes thinking and caring before you spray weedkiller. It includes trying not to use single use plastics. It includes taking care of yourself so you can be a better parent, nurse, or grocer. It includes studying ethics understood as the evaluation of moralities. Usually moral decisions made from the standpoint of universal love are relatively good decisions as we are all subject to the culture we inhabit.

There is no endpoint of universal love. Unlike the Sun and all other deities it's a moveable icon .

Universal love is all that can remain of moral heliocentrism. As most modern people would agree there is no longer one set of codified rituals or one supernatural deity, or one sacred myth that we tell ourselves and each other.
I don't think killing weeds is an expression of universal love unless doing so is springs from what Kierkegaard called repetition. By repetition I mean what Emerson did when he walked home one evening, as usual with no inducement or inspiration beyond what lay before him:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, Note I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.I am glad to the brink of fear.


This is universal love; it is not for a purpose and not possessed by reason or direction. It is Whitmanesque in its inclusiveness. All things yield to the agency that unqualifiedly receives them. for Kierkegaard, this is living in the eternal present where he places the soul and God (though it is not the "dogmatic" God. It is what we call God when universal love takes hold of us). And all matters issue from freedom, which is Now.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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GE Morton
Well, then you're apparently relying on a different definition of "absolute" than the one I gave above: "A proposition which cannot possibly be false." There is no way a tautology can be false, or contradiction true. If you disagree, please provide an example.

"A tautology could have this kind of nature only the language and logic I use can be objectively verified . . ."

A language is not something that must, or can, be "verified." It is a convention. It needs no validation or verification beyond agreement among its users as to the meanings of its formulae. That a given term has a certain meaning is objectively verifiable, by observing whether the meaning in question is assumed by native speakers in their ordinary uses of the term.
Language certainly is a convention in its historical aspect, but it is also, as you know, confined structurally within possibilities of experience. Were this so hermeneutically sealed so as to not even permit an acknowledgement of transcendence, then we would be like software and the mechanics of knowing would would be a true absolute to us. But hermeneutics tells us that 'absolute' is itself bound to interpretative status, it is part of taking up the world "as" a symbolic interposition between us and transcendence. Metaphysics has a long history of, if you ask me, foolishness, but remove the foolishness, and it is not as if there is no longer transcendence. Pursue this philosophically, follow Kierkegaard and his existential progeny (certainly not Kierkegaardians), and witness the ideatum far surpasses the idea, as Levinas puts it. This is where existential, or "actual" absoluteness begins and confronts us.
Tautologies, contradictions: I mean, how is it that such strictly logical terms can even approach actuality? Wittgenstein was a great fan of Kierkegaard for a reason: while the latter was, as Heidegger said, too much the religious writer, he compellingly put forth the transcendent nature of our being here.
Nor do they need any. For Kant the categories are inescapable, "built-in" principles and premises from which all conscious reasoning begins.
Kant was not the great affirmer of absolutes; he was the denier. But he had to admit the lack of foundation intuitions with their concepts had. Being a rationlist, he had little interest in anything but reason.
I have no idea what "grasping eternity" might mean, or what a "totality" of language and logic would look like. If "absolute" somehow implies a "grasp of eternity," then the word is meaningless; it serves no useful function in the language. If no propositions are absolutely true, and there is no distinction to be made between "absolute" and "relative," then those two terms are superfluous.
Spoken like a true positivist (though, I am aware there are varieties in this. Kant, some say, was the father of positivism. And the father of phenomenology, as well. But they diverge so). Not having an idea as to what grasping eternity is, is, well, rather the point. Keep in mind that Kant gets a lot of mileage out of examining the rational structure of the judgments we make. There is much mileage to be gotten out of the "metaphysics" of the objects around us as well as ourselves. One would have to read considerably from the historical response to Kant to know why and how their is, in the full and responsible philosophical mission, so many "more things in heaven and earth" than tautological absolutes can produce. It is not that we drop reason, which is impossible; it is that when it comes to ethics, it is the content of the logical form that matters, not the form. There is nothing logic has to say about ethics, as Hume rightly pointed out. Even after an empirical examination of the ethical, the good and bad of ethics remains untouched and deeply mysterious. This is what Wittgenstein and Mackie were on about.
Why? And if it is, then how can we grasp that content? To say that something is transcendental is to say that it is not apprehensible by us (such as Kant's noumena).
Not understood as one might understand plate tectonics or demorgan's theorem, no. With value we are clearly out of our depth. But ethics/value are the very foundation of existence. Reason is a pragmatic tool. It bears none of the stuff of what we are. And what we are cannot be contained in a concept (which is at the basis of a lot of existential philosophy). It is not like Kant's noumena, which is remote and a construction of reason, a kind of dialectical necessity. Even if you admit Heidegger's emphasis on language and Being, there is nothing in language and logic that prohibits content. Value and ethics especially cannot be assimilated into language. But its "thereness" is ever present, in the concrete actuality we dealwith all the time.
Mackie seems to making the common mistake of equating "objective" with "absolute." But value assignments are never objective, and certainly not absolute. That x has value V is meaningless unless a valuer is specified; it must have the form, x has value V to P. Note that the latter proposition is objective, because we can observe what value P attaches to x, by observing his behavior with respect to it.
Well, I did not give you the book, just a paragraph. He is quite thorough, and is very much on your side of this issue. He is a moral nihilist. He thinks that ethical rights and wrongs have their meanings exhausted in what we can make sense of. He helped me understand what I do NOT believe. You would like him.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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Hereandnow wrote: June 10th, 2019, 10:55 am
Language certainly is a convention in its historical aspect, but it is also, as you know, confined structurally within possibilities of experience. Were this so hermeneutically sealed so as to not even permit an acknowledgement of transcendence, then we would be like software and the mechanics of knowing would would be a true absolute to us. But hermeneutics tells us that 'absolute' is itself bound to interpretative status, it is part of taking up the world "as" a symbolic interposition between us and transcendence. Metaphysics has a long history of, if you ask me, foolishness, but remove the foolishness, and it is not as if there is no longer transcendence. Pursue this philosophically, follow Kierkegaard and his existential progeny (certainly not Kierkegaardians), and witness the ideatum far surpasses the idea, as Levinas puts it. This is where existential, or "actual" absoluteness begins and confronts us.
There is no need need to deny transcendence. Kant acknowledged it, and so do I. But we can know nothing about it, take no lessons or inspiration from it, or speak intelligently about it. It is even presumptuous to describe it as "absolute." It is, in fact, a postulated realm, one we must postulate to supply a cause for phenomena. But that is all that can be said about it. It is pointless to speculate about it, because no speculations can ever be confirmed.
Tautologies, contradictions: I mean, how is it that such strictly logical terms can even approach actuality? Wittgenstein was a great fan of Kierkegaard for a reason: while the latter was, as Heidegger said, too much the religious writer, he compellingly put forth the transcendent nature of our being here.
Phenomena are the only "actuality." The transcendent is hypothetical, a postulate. It is responsible for our being here in the same sense that it is responsible for all other experienced phenomena --- for the rest of the perceived universe. I.e., as their postulated cause.
One would have to read considerably from the historical response to Kant to know why and how their is, in the full and responsible philosophical mission, so many "more things in heaven and earth" than tautological absolutes can produce.
Not sure of your meaning there, or point. Of course there are more things than "tautological absolutes can produce." Indeed, we learn nothing from tautological absolutes. But they are the only propositions which cannot possibly be false (which is the definition I assume of "absolute").

You seem to be using "absolute" as a synonym for "transcendental." But since we can know nothing about the latter, we have no idea how, or whether, that term with its ordinary connotations applies to it.
It is not that we drop reason, which is impossible; it is that when it comes to ethics, it is the content of the logical form that matters, not the form. There is nothing logic has to say about ethics, as Hume rightly pointed out. Even after an empirical examination of the ethical, the good and bad of ethics remains untouched and deeply mysterious.
Well, I disagree with Hume. :-) I take ethics to be a rational inquiry, no different in principle than theoretical inquiries into any other domain of phenomena. The task is to develop a set of principles, and rules derived therefrom, for governing interactions between agents in a moral field. It is an optimization problem, similar to devising an optimum set of traffic rules for a highway system. I specifically reject moral "sensibilities" and intuitions as reliable sources for those principles, since they are, by and large, idiosyncratic and products of cultural conditioning.
With value we are clearly out of our depth. But ethics/value are the very foundation of existence. Reason is a pragmatic tool. It bears none of the stuff of what we are. And what we are cannot be contained in a concept (which is at the basis of a lot of existential philosophy). It is not like Kant's noumena, which is remote and a construction of reason, a kind of dialectical necessity. Even if you admit Heidegger's emphasis on language and Being, there is nothing in language and logic that prohibits content. Value and ethics especially cannot be assimilated into language. But its "thereness" is ever present, in the concrete actuality we dealwith all the time.
I don't know what you mean by "ethics/value are the very foundation of existence." "Foundational" in what sense?

What is "ever-present" are subjective values and idiosyncratic moral intuitions, which vary dramatically from person to person, from place to place, and from time to time. The confidence one feels in an intuition is never a guarantee of its soundness.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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There is no need need to deny transcendence. Kant acknowledged it, and so do I. But we can know nothing about it, take no lessons or inspiration from it, or speak intelligently about it. It is even presumptuous to describe it as "absolute." It is, in fact, a postulated realm, one we must postulate to supply a cause for phenomena. But that is all that can be said about it. It is pointless to speculate about it, because no speculations can ever be confirmed.
But it is not just a vacuous postulate. It is, loosely speaking, the very foundation of religion, not the incidental claims in historical documents, the myths, the legends, and so on, but the nature of human religiosity: suffering. Take away all that is in the presentation of religion, it's essence is suffering and the need for redemption. And when we are done with the human enterprise to ameliorate of affairs,the question will turn to possibilities. As Levinas said, Desire of this kind intensifies with engagement, and the true frontier of our existence is our inwardness.
Phenomena are the only "actuality." The transcendent is hypothetical, a postulate. It is responsible for our being here in the same sense that it is responsible for all other experienced phenomena --- for the rest of the perceived universe. I.e., as their postulated cause.
It is "responsible" for our sufferings, and our joys. The argument you seem to make is that transcendence is trivialized as it is accountable for all that is trivially true, "all other experienced phenomena". But nothing is trivially true, because there is no thing without value. All we have before us is phenomena, but this puts the objects in the sphere of the self, that is, our intentionality stands as a constitutional part of the object. I never have, nor has anyone, witnessed a world of things abstracted from the value invested in them; therefore, to talk of objects as if they were trivial amounts to an abstraction from the Jamsian stream of consciousness, a postulate. We live in a moral world, each of us does. Such a thing has never been "seen" for the seeing is never disinterested. It is a scientist's abstraction. The genuine datum gathered by telescope or oscilloscope, is a selected part of a scientist's thought, felt object. (If you have a mind, see Dewey's Nature and Experience for a nice account of this king of thing. Or wasit Art As Experience?)
Not sure of your meaning there, or point. Of course there are more things than "tautological absolutes can produce." Indeed, we learn nothing from tautological absolutes. But they are the only propositions which cannot possibly be false (which is the definition I assume of "absolute").

You seem to be using "absolute" as a synonym for "transcendental." But since we can know nothing about the latter, we have no idea how, or whether, that term with its ordinary connotations applies to it.
Right. I need to be more careful. I'll be brief. I think of absolutes as an ethical dimension of our being here in which there is an intimation of an existential, not logical, absolute. I look at a chair of a cloud, and I have concede that my thoughts that gather around the event do not issue from the objects, but from me. I am convinced that all language is, is an interpretative vehicle for, well, getting along in the world. Our terms do not have any content that reflect, or are a mirror to, the way things are absolutely. Even the term 'absolute' is contextualized, and makes no sense outside of any context. Thus, affirmations of things in the world like, 'there is a bright cloud in the sky' become relativized, and we produce them in a forward looking temporal flux, like that river, as Cratylus said, one cannot put one's foot into even once! There is no way out of this, and we are confined to language to make meaning, and the content, the orange, the middle C on the piano, the taste of lemons and limes: these all become understood relative to what we can say, to the truth bearing possibilities of language. I taste the lemon, but what IS that? This cannot be said, for to say it brings the taste to heel, so to speak, into the conceptual scheme that assimilates it. Transcendence sits before us conditioned by our own thoughts, and the "absolute" of the content, as if the thing were acknowledged in the mind of a God (an absolute cognizer) is never, can never be determined. Transcendence becomes, as you say, a postulate.
But ethics is very different. In ethics there is an intimation of an absolute. Color qua color, taste qua taste" these have no acknowldgable inherent features; that is, we cannot acknowledge them for what they Really are. we can only talk, discuss, give language to. Ehics is just like this, of course. Our ethical terms are just as theoretical as 'cow and 'cloud';but here is the rub: in ethics, there is value, and value is not a contingent "phenomenon" (I like Moore's non-natural quality). It is not even a phenomenon, for it is not seen or qualitatively experienced. It is there, mysteriously, the "badness' of air hunger. It is the badness in the ethical and aesthetic sense, not the contingent sense, that puts into our world(s) something profound.
I won't say absolute, but will say metaphysical. No words work here. But there is something clearly "Other" than the matrix of the everdayness that is at the basis of all we think and do. Value.
Well, I disagree with Hume. :-) I take ethics to be a rational inquiry, no different in principle than theoretical inquiries into any other domain of phenomena. The task is to develop a set of principles, and rules derived therefrom, for governing interactions between agents in a moral field. It is an optimization problem, similar to devising an optimum set of traffic rules for a highway system. I specifically reject moral "sensibilities" and intuitions as reliable sources for those principles, since they are, by and large, idiosyncratic and products of cultural conditioning.
See Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety . The point is that reason, while certainly essential for all you say, cannot encompass the world of actuality. A word is not a thing, to put it plainly. But my above makes the point.
I don't know what you mean by "ethics/value are the very foundation of existence." "Foundational" in what sense?

What is "ever-present" are subjective values and idiosyncratic moral intuitions, which vary dramatically from person to person, from place to place, and from time to time. The confidence one feels in an intuition is never a guarantee of its soundness.
Ethics is value,and value is sewn into our possibilities for experience. All experience is inherently ethical, that is, valuative; that is, that which is in play, at risk, in ethical interaction. No value in play, no ethics. Value is an essential feature of ethics, though not a sufficient one, forthis requires the entanglements with others in the world. But these entanglements are value entangled. How value is played out is where your accounts begin. I am looking at the the underpinning assumptions of this. I mean, in any given ethical system, there is the assumption of value in the world. I am asking (along with those I read) what IS this? It turns out, value is nothing short of miraculous.
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Felix
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by Felix »

GE Morton: "Well, I disagree with Hume. I take ethics to be a rational inquiry, no different in principle than theoretical inquiries into any other domain of phenomena. The task is to develop a set of principles, and rules derived therefrom, for governing interactions between agents in a moral field. It is an optimization problem, similar to devising an optimum set of traffic rules for a highway system."

That approach has never worked and never will, because human beings are not automatons that will behave according to a given set of logical rules.

GE Morton: "I specifically reject moral "sensibilities" and intuitions as reliable sources for those principles, since they are, by and large, idiosyncratic and products of cultural conditioning."

On the contrary, they are not idiosyncratic, but common to all sane individuals. It is the overly neurotic, the sociopath and the psychopath, however logical their thinking may be, who cannot heed these innate moral sensibilities, and must therefore be directed by traffic rules.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by Sculptor1 »

Felix wrote: June 19th, 2019, 3:38 am GE Morton: "I specifically reject moral "sensibilities" and intuitions as reliable sources for those principles, since they are, by and large, idiosyncratic and products of cultural conditioning."

On the contrary, they are not idiosyncratic, but common to all sane individuals. It is the overly neurotic, the sociopath and the psychopath, however logical their thinking may be, who cannot heed these innate moral sensibilities, and must therefore be directed by traffic rules.
There are some commonalities we have inhereted from our primate ancestors, and there are others that are culturally conditioned and historically specific to our times.
And GE Morton is an example of post-fascism, Randroid conditioning. He is not more able to escape his pseudo-logic than he could escape his lungs.
His existence validates Hume in that he himself is also motivated primarily by the passions, but has a veneer of logical-positivism.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by Belindi »

GEMorton wrote:
Well, I disagree with Hume. :-) I take ethics to be a rational inquiry, no different in principle than theoretical inquiries into any other domain of phenomena. The task is to develop a set of principles, and rules derived therefrom, for governing interactions between agents in a moral field. It is an optimization problem, similar to devising an optimum set of traffic rules for a highway system. I specifically reject moral "sensibilities" and intuitions as reliable sources for those principles, since they are, by and large, idiosyncratic and products of cultural conditioning.
I'd maybe agree with you except for the following fact. Hume's claim that passion underlies ethical reasoning has been shown to be true.

Advances in neurology and its clinical application provide plenty of evidence that those who due to some accident are deficient in what Hume called "passion" and which we may call ordinary human kindness are less rational.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by GE Morton »

Felix wrote: June 19th, 2019, 3:38 am
That approach has never worked and never will, because human beings are not automatons that will behave according to a given set of logical rules.
Well, if your claim is that not everyone will follow a set of rules, no matter how morally and logically sound, I'm sure you're right. Not everyone obeys traffic laws either. Should we abandon them as a hopeless cause, or enforce them as best we can?
GE Morton: "I specifically reject moral "sensibilities" and intuitions as reliable sources for those principles, since they are, by and large, idiosyncratic and products of cultural conditioning."

On the contrary, they are not idiosyncratic, but common to all sane individuals. It is the overly neurotic, the sociopath and the psychopath, however logical their thinking may be, who cannot heed these innate moral sensibilities, and must therefore be directed by traffic rules.
Ah. Which sensibilities do you consider "innate and common to all sane individuals"? That abortion is murder, or that it is not? That capital punishment is murder, or that it is justice? That homosexuality is morally unobjectionable, or that it is a sin?

Your claim is ludicrous. I challenge you to cite even one moral sensibility that is common to all sane individuals --- one that does not result in large fractions of the population being deemed "insane."
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by GE Morton »

Hereandnow wrote: June 18th, 2019, 10:21 am
But it is not just a vacuous postulate. It is, loosely speaking, the very foundation of religion, not the incidental claims in historical documents, the myths, the legends, and so on, but the nature of human religiosity: suffering.
Being the foundation for religion is not inconsistent with it being a vacuous postulate. And I'm not at all clear as to why you would consider suffering to be the "nature" of "religiosity," or how the postulate of a transcendent reality alleviates that presumed suffering, other than by imagining it to have properties and powers of which we cannot possibly have knowledge (and not only the powers to alleviate suffering, but the sentience and will to do so).
As Levinas said, Desire of this kind intensifies with engagement, and the true frontier of our existence is our inwardness.
Perhaps. But desires --- wishful thinking --- do not constitute knowledge.
It [the transcendent] is "responsible" for our sufferings, and our joys. The argument you seem to make is that transcendence is trivialized as it is accountable for all that is trivially true, "all other experienced phenomena".
Yes; all propositions asserting the transcendent to be the the cause of something are trivially true, because the transcendent is postulated precisely to serve that purpose. We're merely repeating what we already asserted in that postulate. The actionable causes of suffering do not require knowledge of, or reliance upon, the transcendent. E.g., a tornado rips through a town, causing much destruction and suffering. The perceived tornado is, of course, a phenomenon. We can postulate a transcendent reality that is the cause of that phenomenon, but that will not help us in the least to relieve the suffering caused by the tornado.
But nothing is trivially true, because there is no thing without value. All we have before us is phenomena, but this puts the objects in the sphere of the self, that is, our intentionality stands as a constitutional part of the object. I never have, nor has anyone, witnessed a world of things abstracted from the value invested in them . . .
Well, that is a personal observation, and I can only respond with another. I encounter things every day to which I attach no value, neither positive nor negative. Thousands of them, e.g., the weeds and gravel at the edge of a road, the stones and dead leaves along a path, the clouds passing in the sky, etc. To say that something has value is to say that someone desires it, wishes to gain or retain it, or in the case of disvalue, wishes to avoid it or be rid of it. The measure of its value is given by what the desiring agent will give up to gain that thing (or rid himself of it). What value something has, if any, varies from valuer to valuer. To most of the things I encounter on a daily basis I assign no value whatsoever, either positive or negative. I.e., I would give up nothing either to gain them or be rid of them. Their presence in the world is a matter of indifference to me.
. . . therefore, to talk of objects as if they were trivial amounts to an abstraction from the Jamsian stream of consciousness, a postulate.
I think you're confusing yourself there. What we have been speaking of as trivial is the transcendent, not the phenomenal objects --- the objects of experience --- to which we assign values. Nothing prevents us from assigning a value to the transcendent, of course --- we can assign it to anything we want --- but such an assignment will be entirely arbitrary, frivolous, since we know nothing of it.
I think of absolutes as an ethical dimension of our being here in which there is an intimation of an existential, not logical, absolute . . . But ethics is very different. In ethics there is an intimation of an absolute. Color qua color, taste qua taste" these have no acknowldgable inherent features; that is, we cannot acknowledge them for what they Really are.
I agree that "qualia" (color qua color, etc.) are ineffable. That is because qualia terms are the linguistic primitives from which all description is constructed; they cannot be resolved into simpler components. As Frank Jackson noted in his famous paper, no one can tell color scientist Mary, who knows everything about the physics of light but has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room, what red will look like when she leaves that room and perceives a red rose for the first time. She can only discover that for herself, and when she does she will learn something new about light, something no one could describe to her.

(Here is a decent discussion of Jackson's "knowledge argument"):

https://philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Did_Mary_Know

But you seem to be assuming that qualia are "really" something other than what they appear to be. What is the rationale for that assumption? Why ignore Occam and multiply entities needlessly? The fact that we cannot describe a qualia does not entail that it is something other than the phenomenon we experience, or requires anything beyond itself, other than some kind of cause --- of which we can know nothing.
Ehics is just like this, of course. Our ethical terms are just as theoretical as 'cow and 'cloud';but here is the rub: in ethics, there is value, and value is not a contingent "phenomenon" (I like Moore's non-natural quality). It is not even a phenomenon, for it is not seen or qualitatively experienced. It is there, mysteriously, the "badness' of air hunger. It is the badness in the ethical and aesthetic sense, not the contingent sense, that puts into our world(s) something profound.
Well, such concrete terms as "cow" and "cloud" are not normally considered "theoretical." And I'm mystified at your claim that value is "not a contingent phenomenon." It is not a phenomenon at all; it is a judgment applied by agents to phenomena, and is contingent upon the thing being considered, the circumstances, and especially the agent making the judgment. "Badness" is not a perceived property of things, even painful or harmful things. It is a judgment most of us apply to most painful or harmful things --- but how "bad" pain is depends upon who is suffering it and who is making the judgment. There is nothing transcendent about either the pain or the judgment.

I agree, however, that value assigments are similar to qualia in that they are unanalyzable and ineffable. One can no more explain to someone why chocolate tastes "good" than he can explain what it tastes like. Each person will have to make that discovery for himself, and will thereafter assign his own value to it. (This is true only of "primary satisfiers," things deemed "good in themselves," not things deemed good for instrumental reasons, i.e., because they are useful for obtaining some primary good).

By trying to tie values to the transcendent you're introducing a superfluous complexity that mystifies the subject and contributes nothing to our understanding of it.
The point is that reason, while certainly essential for all you say, cannot encompass the world of actuality. A word is not a thing, to put it plainly.
I agree. But words are the only tools we have for communicating about "actuality" --- which consists of our experiences, not postulated realms beyond experience.
Ethics is value,and value is sewn into our possibilities for experience. All experience is inherently ethical, that is, valuative; that is, that which is in play, at risk, in ethical interaction. No value in play, no ethics. Value is an essential feature of ethics, though not a sufficient one, forthis requires the entanglements with others in the world. But these entanglements are value entangled. How value is played out is where your accounts begin. I am looking at the the underpinning assumptions of this. I mean, in any given ethical system, there is the assumption of value in the world. I am asking (along with those I read) what IS this? It turns out, value is nothing short of miraculous.
I agree that value is essential to ethics. But not any particular values or value judgments. What is inescapable is that all persons assign values to things, which differ from person to person, and that the quality of each person's life is a function of the extent to which he is able to realize his own values. In a social setting, however, it is possible for agents to act in ways that prevent other agents from attaining the things they value. Hence ethics: rules of interaction which allow all agents to realize their own values, whatever they may be, as far as possible, without favoring any agent or any values.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by Belindi »

GEMorton wrote:
Ah. Which sensibilities do you consider "innate and common to all sane individuals"? That abortion is murder, or that it is not? That capital punishment is murder, or that it is justice? That homosexuality is morally unobjectionable, or that it is a sin?
But sensibility is an attribute of sane individuals; sensibility is not an attribute of codified laws. We need sensibility when we take an ethical stance towards clinical abortion, which is one of the ethical problems of our times. That would-be problem solvers have sensibility is a prerequisite before they can effectively approach ethical problems. Safe to say you would not choose a lobotomised man for an ethical dilemma.
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by Felix »

GE Morton: Which sensibilities do you consider "innate and common to all sane individuals"? That abortion is murder, or that it is not? That capital punishment is murder, or that it is justice? That homosexuality is morally unobjectionable, or that it is a sin?

I was referring to the capacity for empathy which all sane individuals have, and un/insane ones lack. Morality requires empathy, and reason too, but not reason alone. Reason alone cannot dictate what is morally right or wrong, and the answers to the questions you mentioned are not strictly rational.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
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