Are there eternal moral truths?

[CIN]

I hold that treating someone as an end in themselves means taking into consideration the effect on them of our actions when choosing how to act. By my definition, you are failing to treat the five unhealthy patients as ends in themselves, because you ignore the effect on them of not taking the healthy patient's organs.

I would consider an alternative view, according to which treating someone as end on themselves means acting in their interests.

I think we can agree that within a utilitarian paradigm, if you distort the felicific calculus so as to omit good to some particular person or group of people, then you are treating them as non-persons, and wronging them thereby.

But if instead you do that full weighing-up of consequences and your calculation happens to come out in favour of Alfie's interests and against Bruno's interests, then you have done your moral duty to Bruno of giving his interests due consideration.

You don't wrong someone just by deciding against them. If that were true, then in any instance where interests conflict, it would be impossible to act rightly. Reductio ad absurdum...

I think you have correctly summarised my position.

you do not seem to believe we have a duty to save people's lives when we can do so.

You do not seem to believe we have a duty not to take people's lives.

I was speaking to @Leontiskos in language which I hoped he would understand. For myself, I believe that we have both of these duties, but that they are not absolute. Both 'save other people's lives when you can' and 'don't take other people's lives' are good moral rules of thumb, which should generally be followed because in most cases they are more likely to have good consequences than bad.

Negative duties (duties not to commit some particular act) are much easier to believe in than positive duties. If I think it wrong to murder or torture people, that duty can be conceived as applying to everyone in a straightforward way. Whereas if you think you have a positive duty (such as feeding the hungry), you need to explain why that duty falls to you rather than to somebody else in any particular instance.

A fair point. (I wish @Leontiskos would adopt the same serious tone when talking to me as you do. He seems to talk to me merely to ridicule me, which is a bit rich considering some of the howlers he comes out with.)

I think the answer is that the duty falls to whoever is available to perform it, and to the extent that they are able to perform it (other things being equal). To pick up a question I asked @Leontiskos (which he has not yet answered): "Suppose you were standing by the road next to a blind man, and he stepped off the kerb into the path of a speeding car. My view is that you should pull him back to safety. You apparently would disagree, since you do not seem to believe we have a duty to save people's lives when we can do so." My view is that if you are best placed to save the blind man, then other things being equal, you have more of a duty to try and save him than someone who is less able to do so (e.g. because they are further away).

I do have a life outside this forum - a very busy one, as it happens. I do not promise to reply to your or anyone else's posts within any finite time period. You will just have to learn to be more patient.

To me, that's fine. There are conflicting demands on your time, which you probably try to resolve honestly and conscientiously. Who could ask more ?

But by your argument, because you could drop everything to reply to @Leontiskos, the fact that you didn't means that you're not treating him as an end...

Surely not. As I've said, my preferred reading of 'treating someone as an end in themselves' is this: 'I hold that treating someone as an end in themselves means taking into consideration the effect on them of our actions when choosing how to act.' Now the calculation as I make it runs like this:
1. Talking to @Leontiskos:
- felicific effect on CIN: generally negative
- felicific effect on @Leontiskos: unknown (to CIN)
- felicific effect on others: unlikely to be positive
- total felicific effect: probably negative
2. Doing something else:
- felicific effect on CIN: generally positive
- felicific effect on @Leontiskos: unknown (to CIN)
- felicific effect on others: likely to be positive
- total felicific effect: probably positive

So I take @Leontiskos into consideration, and the resulting calculation is in favour of not talking to him, but doing something else instead. Truthfully, his behaviour makes the calculation easy. If he thought more and scoffed less, I might find the calculation harder...

[Good_Egg]

I think the answer is that the duty falls to whoever is available to perform it, and to the extent that they are able to perform it (other things being equal). To pick up a question I asked @Leontiskos (which he has not yet answered): "Suppose you were standing by the road next to a blind man, and he stepped off the kerb into the path of a speeding car. My view is that you should pull him back to safety. You apparently would disagree, since you do not seem to believe we have a duty to save people's lives when we can do so." My view is that if you are best placed to save the blind man, then other things being equal, you have more of a duty to try and save him than someone who is less able to do so (e.g. because they are further away).

This was a few days ago now, but I think the question deserves an answer.

I suspect you can't have a little bit of a duty. Any more than you can be a little bit married. You are or you aren't; you do or you don't.

So that if your having a duty to help a drunken man on the street depends on you being the nearest person who could help, then as he staggers to and fro coming closer to and further away from you and others, then your duty appears and disappears according to who is closest at any particular moment.

If your bus arrives when he's not nearest to you then you can get on it with a clear conscience, but if it arrives when you're the nearest then you're morally obliged to miss it in order to go and help ?

Which seems vaguely absurd, but perhaps not totally impossible.

Second, it seems to me that when you promise to help someone then you take on a moral duty to do so. So that if duty is all-or-nothing as I'm suggesting, then a pre-existing duty would make such a promise meaningless.

Thirdly, your preferred example of saving a blind man from a speeding car seems to involve a large gain in total utility for no loss, which seems like a very good thing to do. But that's an extreme case; many choices are less clear-cut. If you've a chance of saving the blind man but making the attempt has a non-zero chance that the speeding car will kill someone else, then saying that you have a duty to try seems to pre-judge the difficult question.

To say that it's your duty if it's easy but that the duty somehow tails off as the situation becomes more difficult is again to deny the all-or-nothing nature of duty.

[CIN]

I think the answer is that the duty falls to whoever is available to perform it, and to the extent that they are able to perform it (other things being equal). To pick up a question I asked @Leontiskos (which he has not yet answered): "Suppose you were standing by the road next to a blind man, and he stepped off the kerb into the path of a speeding car. My view is that you should pull him back to safety. You apparently would disagree, since you do not seem to believe we have a duty to save people's lives when we can do so." My view is that if you are best placed to save the blind man, then other things being equal, you have more of a duty to try and save him than someone who is less able to do so (e.g. because they are further away).

This was a few days ago now, but I think the question deserves an answer.
I suspect you can't have a little bit of a duty. Any more than you can be a little bit married. You are or you aren't; you do or you don't.

So that if your having a duty to help a drunken man on the street depends on you being the nearest person who could help, then as he staggers to and fro coming closer to and further away from you and others, then your duty appears and disappears according to who is closest at any particular moment.

First of all, I wonder if you think there is a difference between having a moral duty and having a moral obligation; that is, that 'I have a moral duty to do X' means something different from 'I ought to do X'. I don't think there is a difference, but I'd be interested to know if you do, and if so, why.

I don't think the duty appears and disappears as the blind man staggers about, but I think it may become greater and smaller. Anyone who could save him has a duty to try and save him, but because the person closest to him at any given moment has the best chance of succeeding, at that moment they have the greatest duty. I can imagine someone saying, after he has been run over, 'You were nearest to him, so why didn't you try to save him?' And it seems to me that that would be a reasonable question, even though people a little further away might also have been able to save him.

If you don't think some duties can be greater than others, how would you resolve unexpected conflicts between different duties? Suppose you have promised to deliver life-saving drugs to a hospital tomorrow, and there's no-one else available to do it; and you have also promised to take your 10-year-old nephew to the cinema today, and again, there is no-one else available. And then you get a call from the hospital saying the drugs are needed today, not tomorrow, and you don't have time to keep both promises. How do you decide which promise to keep? I would deliver the drugs, on the grounds that the consequences of not doing so are worse than the consequences of not taking my nephew to the cinema; and because of that, I would say that I had a greater duty to deliver the drugs. What would you do and say in that situation? Perhaps you would say that this wasn't a matter of one duty being greater than another, but of one obligation being greater; in which case I would like to know what you think gives duties their moral force, and what gives obligations their moral force, because presumably they would have to be different.

If your bus arrives when he's not nearest to you then you can get on it with a clear conscience, but if it arrives when you're the nearest then you're morally obliged to miss it in order to go and help ?

Which seems vaguely absurd, but perhaps not totally impossible.

If you're near enough to have a chance of saving the blind man, then I don't think you can get on the bus with a clear conscience until he's safe. After all, the other people who are nearer to him might not bother to save him.

Whether you are morally obliged to miss the bus depends on whether you are morally obliged to catch it in the first place. If not, then yes, you are morally obliged to miss it. It's pretty unlikely in reality that you would have a moral obligation to catch the bus that was greater than the moral obligation to save the blind man, but I'm sure we could invent a situation where that was the case.

Second, it seems to me that when you promise to help someone then you take on a moral duty to do so. So that if duty is all-or-nothing as I'm suggesting, then a pre-existing duty would make such a promise meaningless.

I think promising automatically creates a duty - to promise to do X necessarily implies an obligation to do X - but I don't think this necessarily implied duty is a moral duty, I think it's merely a quasi-legal one within the quasi-legal institution of promise-making. If it was a moral duty, then people would have a moral duty to keep promises to commit evil acts, and I don't think that makes sense.

I think any moral obligation arising from a promise doesn't arise from the promise itself, but from the difference between the expected consequences of keeping the promise and the expected consequences of breaking it. One should aim for the best consequences, and whether or not one ought to keep the promise or break it depends on those expected consequences.

Thirdly, your preferred example of saving a blind man from a speeding car seems to involve a large gain in total utility for no loss, which seems like a very good thing to do. But that's an extreme case; many choices are less clear-cut. If you've a chance of saving the blind man but making the attempt has a non-zero chance that the speeding car will kill someone else, then saying that you have a duty to try seems to pre-judge the difficult question.

To say that it's your duty if it's easy but that the duty somehow tails off as the situation becomes more difficult is again to deny the all-or-nothing nature of duty.

I asked at the start of this post whether you thought duty and obligation were different. Your comment here seems to suggest that you do. As I've said, I don't. This is because I don't believe that moral duties can arise from any other source than expected felicific consequences, which in my scheme is the same source as for a moral obligation. So there's no pre-judging of the 'difficult question' (I take it you mean, the question 'ought I to try and save him?'), because once you've made the judgment about duty, you've already answered that question.

[Good_Egg]

First of all, I wonder if you think there is a difference between having a moral duty and having a moral obligation; that is, that 'I have a moral duty to do X' means something different from 'I ought to do X'. I don't think there is a difference, but I'd be interested to know if you do, and if so, why.

Duty and obligation seem like pretty much the same thing to me, but I'm open to argument.

Where I do insist on a distinction is between a good deed and a moral duty. I deny that one has a duty to be performing the morally best of all possible actions at every moment of every day. I believe that one can (and by definition should) fulfil one's duties/obligations, with a reasonable hope of time & resources left over to do what one freely chooses. And that if you spend some of that time/resource on helping others then that is a virtuous, a morally praiseworthy act that is not a duty.

I don't think the duty appears and disappears as the blind man staggers about, but I think it may become greater and smaller. Anyone who could save him has a duty to try and save him, but because the person closest to him at any given moment has the best chance of succeeding, at that moment they have the greatest duty.

I think you're saying that if there is any chance that all those who are nearer might not save him, then it is your duty to assume that they won't, and act accordingly. Even though you think they have a duty to do so.

I don't think that's tenable. I think that leads to you having a duty/obligation to drive an ambulance to hospital whenever you can. Because the ambulance driver whose duty it is might decide not to do it...

I can imagine someone saying, after he has been run over, 'You were nearest to him, so why didn't you try to save him?' And it seems to me that that would be a reasonable question, even though people a little further away might also have been able to save him.

And if the reply is "my attention was elsewhere," is that a reasonable answer ?

If you don't think some duties can be greater than others, how would you resolve unexpected conflicts between different duties? Suppose you have promised to deliver life-saving drugs to a hospital tomorrow, and there's no-one else available to do it; and you have also promised to take your 10-year-old nephew to the cinema today, and again, there is no-one else available. And then you get a call from the hospital saying the drugs are needed today, not tomorrow, and you don't have time to keep both promises. How do you decide which promise to keep?

Yes, it is possible for duties to conflict. And therefore one should be careful of what one promises...

The person you made a promise to can release you from it, can waive their right to what you've promised them. So in this case what you'd do is ask your nephew if he consents to postponing the cinema trip. Possibly offering added enticements to get him to agree (Ice cream ?). Or ask one of the other volunteer drivers if they can swap shifts with you, possibly offering enticements ("I'll do the same for you...") to get them to agree.

But if all attempts to resolve the dilemma to the satisfaction of all parties fail, then what ?

Seems to me that the bottom line is either that you've (implicitly or explicitly) promised the hospital that you'll be available when needed. In which case you've an apparently irreconcilable conflict of duties. But see below.

Or you've not promised your time today to the hospital (because your offer was specifically for tomorrow) and have promised your time today to your nephew. In which case your moral obligation today is to your nephew. In which case it seems that an ethic of duty and an ethic of optimizing consequences point in opposite directions.

I think promising automatically creates a duty - to promise to do X necessarily implies an obligation to do X - but I don't think this necessarily implied duty is a moral duty, I think it's merely a quasi-legal one within the quasi-legal institution of promise-making. If it was a moral duty, then people would have a moral duty to keep promises to commit evil acts, and I don't think that makes sense.

If you make a promise in good faith and it turns out that the only way to fulfil that promise is to commit an evil act, then you're in the much the same position of conflicting duties as in the previous example. The difference being that one of the duties is a positive duty to fulfil the promise and the other is the negative duty not to commit the evil act.

This is a genuine moral dilemma. Which it wouldn't be if there were no moral duty of promise-keeping.

And again you can (?should?) try to resolve it by consent.
But if you cannot ?

I'd argue that if you have an accident and break your leg so that you are unable to take your nephew to the cinema on the promised day, then you owe him that treat when you are in a position to deliver it.

In other words that a promise carries an implicit rider "if I can", such that if circumstances mean that you cannot, then the promise is not cancelled but merely postponed. Would you agree ?

And so by analogy, a promise carries an implicit rider "if I may", such that if circumstances mean that you may not (because the act would be evil) then the promise is not cancelled but postponed until circumstances change.

In which case, you may with good conscience postpone your nephew's treat until your prior commitment to the hospital permits.

But if you have made no such commitment, then you should still keep your promise to your nephew.

I think any moral obligation arising from a promise doesn't arise from the promise itself, but from the difference between the expected consequences of keeping the promise and the expected consequences of breaking it. One should aim for the best consequences, and whether or not one ought to keep the promise or break it depends on those expected consequences.

This says that all promises are empty; that you have a duty to do what will secure the best consequences if you don"t promise and exactly the same duty if you do promise and exactly the same duty if you promise the opposite. So in any world where promises are meaningful, this view is false.

So there's no pre-judging of the 'difficult question' (I take it you mean, the question 'ought I to try and save him?'), because once you've made the judgment about duty, you've already answered that question.

The difficult question is "ought I try to save him if that involves risking someone else's life ?" And yes, that's what pre-judging is.

But on reflection, if one allows that duties may conflict then it doesn't. OK, scrap that argument...

[CIN]

First of all, I wonder if you think there is a difference between having a moral duty and having a moral obligation; that is, that 'I have a moral duty to do X' means something different from 'I ought to do X'. I don't think there is a difference, but I'd be interested to know if you do, and if so, why.

Duty and obligation seem like pretty much the same thing to me, but I'm open to argument.

I think they're the same, so at least we can agree about that.

Where I do insist on a distinction is between a good deed and a moral duty. I deny that one has a duty to be performing the morally best of all possible actions at every moment of every day. I believe that one can (and by definition should) fulfil one's duties/obligations, with a reasonable hope of time & resources left over to do what one freely chooses. And that if you spend some of that time/resource on helping others then that is a virtuous, a morally praiseworthy act that is not a duty.

That distinction is clear and comprehensible. But what you now need to do is explain how you decide that you have a particular duty or obligation: because until you can do that, your choice of duties and obligations is arbitrary, and so therefore is your choice of how much time to set aside for yourself.

Is there a reasoning process by which you decide what your duties are, or are you simply relying on a supposed moral intuition?

I don't think the duty appears and disappears as the blind man staggers about, but I think it may become greater and smaller. Anyone who could save him has a duty to try and save him, but because the person closest to him at any given moment has the best chance of succeeding, at that moment they have the greatest duty.

I think you're saying that if there is any chance that all those who are nearer might not save him, then it is your duty to assume that they won't, and act accordingly. Even though you think they have a duty to do so.

No, I'm not saying that. That would result in everyone with my views piling on top of one another to save the guy, which would be unworkable. I'm saying that once you become aware of the blind man on the edge of the kerb, you have a duty to stay involved with the situation until you're satisfied that your intervention isn't required. Once someone is clearly saving the guy, no-one else has a duty to save him.

I don't think that's tenable. I think that leads to you having a duty/obligation to drive an ambulance to hospital whenever you can. Because the ambulance driver whose duty it is might decide not to do it...

No, not 'whenever you can', just if you become aware that the driver may not be in a fit state to drive.

I can imagine someone saying, after he has been run over, 'You were nearest to him, so why didn't you try to save him?' And it seems to me that that would be a reasonable question, even though people a little further away might also have been able to save him.

And if the reply is "my attention was elsewhere," is that a reasonable answer ?

Yes. If you genuinely weren't aware of the blind man, you couldn't have saved him, so it isn't the case that you ought to have saved him, because 'ought' implies 'can'.

If you don't think some duties can be greater than others, how would you resolve unexpected conflicts between different duties? Suppose you have promised to deliver life-saving drugs to a hospital tomorrow, and there's no-one else available to do it; and you have also promised to take your 10-year-old nephew to the cinema today, and again, there is no-one else available. And then you get a call from the hospital saying the drugs are needed today, not tomorrow, and you don't have time to keep both promises. How do you decide which promise to keep?

Yes, it is possible for duties to conflict. And therefore one should be careful of what one promises...

The person you made a promise to can release you from it, can waive their right to what you've promised them. So in this case what you'd do is ask your nephew if he consents to postponing the cinema trip. Possibly offering added enticements to get him to agree (Ice cream ?). Or ask one of the other volunteer drivers if they can swap shifts with you, possibly offering enticements ("I'll do the same for you...") to get them to agree.

But if all attempts to resolve the dilemma to the satisfaction of all parties fail, then what ?

Yes, that is the pertinent question.

Seems to me that the bottom line is either that you've (implicitly or explicitly) promised the hospital that you'll be available when needed. In which case you've an apparently irreconcilable conflict of duties. But see below.

Or you've not promised your time today to the hospital (because your offer was specifically for tomorrow) and have promised your time today to your nephew. In which case your moral obligation today is to your nephew. In which case it seems that an ethic of duty and an ethic of optimizing consequences point in opposite directions.

This seems to me to be a disadvantage of your position. If you have two unrelated ethics conflicting with each other, to what are you going to appeal to determine which of them has priority?

I think promising automatically creates a duty - to promise to do X necessarily implies an obligation to do X - but I don't think this necessarily implied duty is a moral duty, I think it's merely a quasi-legal one within the quasi-legal institution of promise-making. If it was a moral duty, then people would have a moral duty to keep promises to commit evil acts, and I don't think that makes sense.

If you make a promise in good faith and it turns out that the only way to fulfil that promise is to commit an evil act...

That's not what I was talking about. I was talking about a promise to commit an evil act, not a promise to do a good act that you subsequently discover would require an evil act in order to keep it. I had in mind e.g. Hitler promising to send all the Jews to the gas chamber. See below.

... then you're in the much the same position of conflicting duties as in the previous example.

The difference being that one of the duties is a positive duty to fulfil the promise and the other is the negative duty not to commit the evil act.

This is a genuine moral dilemma. Which it wouldn't be if there were no moral duty of promise-keeping.

If there is always a moral duty to keep promises, then it follows that Hitler has a positive moral duty to keep his promise and send the Jews to the gas chamber. Evidently you would say that he has a negative moral duty not to send the Jews to the gas chamber, and that this overrides the positive moral duty to keep his promise and send them. For myself, I do not see how Hitler's duty to keep his promise could in any way be described as 'moral'. How could a promise to murder millions of people have anything moral about it?

I think people think there is a moral duty to keep promises because almost invariably a promise is a promise to do something good for someone. That makes promise-keeping itself seem to be a moral act. But I think any moral content to the act of promise-keeping comes from what the promise would achieve if it were kept, i.e. its expected consequences, and not at all from the mere fact of promising.

I'd argue that if you have an accident and break your leg so that you are unable to take your nephew to the cinema on the promised day, then you owe him that treat when you are in a position to deliver it.

I agree, but I think the reason you owe it to him is not because of the promise, but because of what the promise did: it raised his expectations of a pleasant experience, which he would not have had if you had not made the promise. When you failed to keep the promise, you made things less pleasant for him than they would have been if you hadn't promised at all: so you now owe him more than you did when the promise was made - you owe him the pleasure he would have had if you had kept the promise, plus compensation for the disappointment he felt when you failed to keep the promise.

In other words that a promise carries an implicit rider "if I can", such that if circumstances mean that you cannot, then the promise is not cancelled but merely postponed. Would you agree ?

No, I would say that if you fail to keep your promise to your nephew then you owe him something, but it need not be the same promise postponed, it could be something else, e.g. an Xbox. Merely postponing the promise and then keeping it isn't good enough, because that doesn't compensate him for the disappointment from the first breaking of the promise.

And so by analogy, a promise carries an implicit rider "if I may", such that if circumstances mean that you may not (because the act would be evil) then the promise is not cancelled but postponed until circumstances change.

In which case, you may with good conscience postpone your nephew's treat until your prior commitment to the hospital permits.

I don't consider conscience to be a reliable guide to morality. I think 'conscience' is really just a name for feelings of guilt and absence of feelings of guilt, and feelings aren't rational.

I think any moral obligation arising from a promise doesn't arise from the promise itself, but from the difference between the expected consequences of keeping the promise and the expected consequences of breaking it. One should aim for the best consequences, and whether or not one ought to keep the promise or break it depends on those expected consequences.

This says that all promises are empty; that you have a duty to do what will secure the best consequences if you don"t promise and exactly the same duty if you do promise and exactly the same duty if you promise the opposite. So in any world where promises are meaningful, this view is false.

No, it doesn't say that promises are empty, because promising changes expectations, and hence may change people's actions, and therefore may change expected consequences. In a world without promises, you would not promise to take drugs to a hospital, so the hospital would keep trying to get drugs, and would either fail or succeed; but in a world with promises, you might promise to take drugs to the hospital, and then the hospital would assume that it would get the drugs, and stop looking for a supplier. In the former case, your duty to take drugs to the hospital is conditional on nobody else supplying the drugs first; in the latter case, your duty to take drugs to the hospital is unconditional, because the hospital is relying on you and you alone (or you must assume so). A world in which there is promise-making works differently from a world in which promise-making does not exist: consequences are different, and therefore duties are different.

[Good_Egg]

But what you now need to do is explain how you decide that you have a particular duty or obligation: because until you can do that, your choice of duties and obligations is arbitrary, and so therefore is your choice of how much time to set aside for yourself.

Is there a reasoning process by which you decide what your duties are, or are you simply relying on a supposed moral intuition?

You're right that if one accepts the distinction, that raises the question of what one's duties/obligations are (as distinct from other virtuous acts that one could perform).

The answer I'm tentatively putting forward is that your duties are:
- the negative duties not to "actively harm" others (rob them, assault them etc).
- the positive duties that you have taken on by promising
- the positive duties to your parents and family who took care of you when you were too young to care for yourself.

Whilst we can argue exactly where the boundaries to these categories are, do you doubt that such boundaries exist ?

Whereas it seems like you're unable to draw a line between having and not having an obligation. You talk about duties "becoming greater and smaller" without being able to delimit when a duty ceases to exist.

The poor will be always with us; there will always be good causes to which you could devote any amount of time or resources. Every £ and every minute you'll ever have could be spent helping somebody. Where does your duty end ?

This seems to me to be a disadvantage of your position. If you have two unrelated ethics conflicting with each other, to what are you going to appeal to determine which of them has priority?

I'm suggesting that consequentialism isn't the be-all and end-all that you think it is, and that if your moral obligation points one way and your judgment of best consequences points the other way then you should do your duty regardless of consequences. That's what duty means.

If there is always a moral duty to keep promises, then it follows that Hitler has a positive moral duty to keep his promise and send the Jews to the gas chamber. Evidently you would say that he has a negative moral duty not to send the Jews to the gas chamber, and that this overrides the positive moral duty to keep his promise and send them. For myself, I do not see how Hitler's duty to keep his promise could in any way be described as 'moral'. How could a promise to murder millions of people have anything moral about it?

I would indeed say that he had a moral duty not to murder anyone, Jewish or otherwise, usibg gas or otherwise, and that this should have prevented him acting on his promise to implement a Final Solution to what he perceived as the Jewish problem.

If there were a morally legitimate solution within his power, he would be morally obliged (to his supporters to whom he made the promise) to implement it.

But making a promise doesn't magically let you off any pre-existing moral duties. Including the duty of fulfilling an earlier promise.

I think people think there is a moral duty to keep promises because almost invariably a promise is a promise to do something good for someone. That makes promise-keeping itself seem to be a moral act. But I think any moral content to the act of promise-keeping comes from what the promise would achieve if it were kept, i.e. its expected consequences, and not at all from the mere fact of promising.

I think here you're reluctant to apply the adjective "moral" to what you've agreed is an obligation. And that you'll struggle to present a convincing account of a system of obligations without saying that one should fulfil one's obligations. Which in common parlance is to speak of moral duty.

In a world without promises, you would not promise to take drugs to a hospital, so the hospital would keep trying to get drugs, and would either fail or succeed; but in a world with promises, you might promise to take drugs to the hospital, and then the hospital would assume that it would get the drugs, and stop looking for a supplier. In the former case, your duty to take drugs to the hospital is conditional on nobody else supplying the drugs first; in the latter case, your duty to take drugs to the hospital is unconditional, because the hospital is relying on you and you alone (or you must assume so).

This seems a welcome shift from your earlier position. You're now saying that you have an unconditional duty to fulfil a promise, and should act on the assumption that it is important to the recipient of the promise that you do so.

Although you're making that conditional on the promised act being what you consider to be a very good act...

Some of your earlier statements, by contrast, suggested a lying and manipulative person who would make promises in order to alter other people's expectations and thus behaviour, without for a moment considering those promises to be binding on his own future actions...

[CIN]

But what you now need to do is explain how you decide that you have a particular duty or obligation: because until you can do that, your choice of duties and obligations is arbitrary, and so therefore is your choice of how much time to set aside for yourself.

Is there a reasoning process by which you decide what your duties are, or are you simply relying on a supposed moral intuition?

You're right that if one accepts the distinction, that raises the question of what one's duties/obligations are (as distinct from other virtuous acts that one could perform).

The answer I'm tentatively putting forward is that your duties are:
- the negative duties not to "actively harm" others (rob them, assault them etc).
- the positive duties that you have taken on by promising
- the positive duties to your parents and family who took care of you when you were too young to care for yourself.

This doesn't answer my question. I didn't ask 'what one's duties/obligations are', I asked what the process is by which you decide what they are. This is important because if you don't have an answer to this question, your opinions as to what moral duties we have are unsupported by any rational argument.

Are you a moral realist? I get the impression that you are. If so, then it's incumbent on you to explain what it is about the world that makes at least some of your moral judgments objectively true. My view is that there are natural facts which are also potentially moral facts (e.g. that pain is intrinsically bad), and the process by which I derive my ideas about duties and obligations is, I would claim, a process of reasoning starting from those facts. I assume you would not arrive at your belief in certain duties by that route; so what route would you use?

One way you could answer my question would be to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'; i.e. make a factual statement and then infer from it that someone ought to do or refrain from doing something. This is something I think anyone who claims to be a moral realist should be able to do. I think I can do this. Can you?

Whilst we can argue exactly where the boundaries to these categories are, do you doubt that such boundaries exist ?

Whereas it seems like you're unable to draw a line between having and not having an obligation. You talk about duties "becoming greater and smaller" without being able to delimit when a duty ceases to exist.

The poor will be always with us; there will always be good causes to which you could devote any amount of time or resources. Every £ and every minute you'll ever have could be spent helping somebody. Where does your duty end ?

The problem here is that you are excluding duties to oneself, and thinking only of duties to others. If there were no duties to oneself, then indeed there would be no limit to the amount of time and money you ought to spend on others; but I think there are duties to oneself, for the simple reason that what is good for oneself is still a good even though it is not a good for someone else. Since it's a good, one ought to promote it, other things being equal.

This seems to me to be a disadvantage of your position. If you have two unrelated ethics conflicting with each other, to what are you going to appeal to determine which of them has priority?

I'm suggesting that consequentialism isn't the be-all and end-all that you think it is, and that if your moral obligation points one way and your judgment of best consequences points the other way then you should do your duty regardless of consequences. That's what duty means.

But this just highlights the current unsupported nature of your position. How are you to decide what your moral duties are? Until you've done that, you can't begin to resolve these dilemmas. So I come back to my earlier question: can you derive at least one 'ought' from an 'is'? If you can't do that, then you can't justify any assertion of the form 'it is my duty to do X', and your entire moral system rests on thin air.

If there is always a moral duty to keep promises, then it follows that Hitler has a positive moral duty to keep his promise and send the Jews to the gas chamber. Evidently you would say that he has a negative moral duty not to send the Jews to the gas chamber, and that this overrides the positive moral duty to keep his promise and send them. For myself, I do not see how Hitler's duty to keep his promise could in any way be described as 'moral'. How could a promise to murder millions of people have anything moral about it?

I would indeed say that he had a moral duty not to murder anyone, Jewish or otherwise, usibg gas or otherwise, and that this should have prevented him acting on his promise to implement a Final Solution to what he perceived as the Jewish problem.

If there were a morally legitimate solution within his power, he would be morally obliged (to his supporters to whom he made the promise) to implement it.

But making a promise doesn't magically let you off any pre-existing moral duties. Including the duty of fulfilling an earlier promise.

So the model you are proposing is that if you have a pre-existing duty D, you are not morally obliged to keep a promise where doing so would mean that you cannot fulfil D.

Is that true irrespective of what D is? For example, if D is a pre-existing duty to wash the dishes before my wife gets home from work, and I then promise to drive my seriously ill neighbour to the hospital instead because the ambulance has not turned up, do I not have to keep that promise because my duty to wash the dishes came first?

You may perhaps see what I am driving at here. It seems to me that D only overrides the promise if the consequences of not fulfilling D are worse than the consequences of not keeping the promise. I think the reason you think Hitler should not have kept his promise to gas the Jews is that the consequences of his keeping the promise are worse than the consequences of his NOT keeping it; so you are unconsciously relying on consequentialism to decide whether a promise is allowed to override another duty or not. In the other case I mention, the consequences of not driving my neighbour to the hospital are worse than the consequences of not washing the dishes, so in that case i should break my promise to my wife, drive my neighbour to the hospital, and leave the dishes unwashed.

I think people think there is a moral duty to keep promises because almost invariably a promise is a promise to do something good for someone. That makes promise-keeping itself seem to be a moral act. But I think any moral content to the act of promise-keeping comes from what the promise would achieve if it were kept, i.e. its expected consequences, and not at all from the mere fact of promising.

I think here you're reluctant to apply the adjective "moral" to what you've agreed is an obligation.

I am, but I've explained why that is: it's because I think the obligation to keep a promise is not a moral obligation, but merely a quasi-legal one. One does not have a moral obligation to obey bad laws, one only has a legal obligation to obey them, which is not in itself morally binding.

And that you'll struggle to present a convincing account of a system of obligations without saying that one should fulfil one's obligations. Which in common parlance is to speak of moral duty.

Aaagh! You are doing what @Leontiskos does. 'Common parlance' is the talk of people who have not studied philosophy and must therefore be presumed not to understand the matter. I had this problem when he claimed that ice cream is sweet, even when I proved to him that it isn't. For goodness' sake let us not start relying on 'common parlance'; the uneducated cannot be allowed to arbitrate in disagreements between the educated.

What people 'in common parlance' say is an obligation or a duty can at best serve only as a pointer to the truth; it does not decide the truth, and it is rarely the whole truth, because most people don't understand how morality really works.

In a world without promises, you would not promise to take drugs to a hospital, so the hospital would keep trying to get drugs, and would either fail or succeed; but in a world with promises, you might promise to take drugs to the hospital, and then the hospital would assume that it would get the drugs, and stop looking for a supplier. In the former case, your duty to take drugs to the hospital is conditional on nobody else supplying the drugs first; in the latter case, your duty to take drugs to the hospital is unconditional, because the hospital is relying on you and you alone (or you must assume so).

This seems a welcome shift from your earlier position. You're now saying that you have an unconditional duty to fulfil a promise, and should act on the assumption that it is important to the recipient of the promise that you do so.

As a rule of thumb, yes. But not if the expected consequences of taking the drugs to the hospital are worse than those of not taking them. (Which would be rare.) Not 'unconditional' in THAT sense.

Although you're making that conditional on the promised act being what you consider to be a very good act...

Yes.

Some of your earlier statements, by contrast, suggested a lying and manipulative person who would make promises in order to alter other people's expectations and thus behaviour, without for a moment considering those promises to be binding on his own future actions...

Such a person would usually be acting in their own interests and no-one else's, which would not be moral. But if they lied and manipulated in order to achieve better consequences overall, and did so knowingly and with that intention, then I would say their actions were moral.

[Good_Egg]

I didn't ask 'what one's duties/obligations are', I asked what the process is by which you decide what they are. This is important because if you don't have an answer to this question, your opinions as to what moral duties we have are unsupported by any rational argument.

Are you a moral realist? I get the impression that you are. If so, then it's incumbent on you to explain what it is about the world that makes at least some of your moral judgments objectively true.

I don't think it works like that. If you are completely lacking in moral intuition, and deny that the words "should" and "moral" are meaningful, then nothing I can say will convince you otherwise. I can't reason you into perceiving moral wrongness. There's no answer to the question "why should you be moral" that you'd accept.

But if we share concepts like "duty", and share some moral intuitions, then by discussion we can refine our ideas. Identify internal inconsistencies in our thinking, and places where our theorizing doesn't match our intuitions. Encouraging each other to do better.

It's a bootstrapping process - using reason to identify when fallible moral intuition is letting us down, and using moral intuition to identify when delight in the power and neatness of our theories is leading us away from the data.

My view is that there are natural facts which are also potentially moral facts (e.g. that pain is intrinsically bad), and the process by which I derive my ideas about duties and obligations is, I would claim, a process of reasoning starting from those facts. I assume you would not arrive at your belief in certain duties by that route; so what route would you use?

One way you could answer my question would be to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'; i.e. make a factual statement and then infer from it that someone ought to do or refrain from doing something. This is something I think anyone who claims to be a moral realist should be able to do. I think I can do this. Can you?

Until someone convinces me otherwise, I don't think anyone can derive an ought from an is. If you have a moral intuition that pain ought not to exist, you can possibly reason from that to a duty not to create pain in self or others. But if having thought about it your "intrinsically bad" does not contain such an "ought", then it's hard to see how you could do so.

If there were no duties to oneself, then indeed there would be no limit to the amount of time and money you ought to spend on others; but I think there are duties to oneself, for the simple reason that what is good for oneself is still a good even though it is not a good for someone else. Since it's a good, one ought to promote it, other things being equal.

You seem to be saying that there is no limit to moral duty. You are morally obliged to spend all your time and resources helping others, but fortunately you also have a moral duty to create pleasure for yourself. So that £5 you spent on beer last night ? You had a duty to spend it thus, which just happened to over-ride your undoubted moral duty to give the money to charity...

So the model you are proposing is that if you have a pre-existing duty D, you are not morally obliged to keep a promise where doing so would mean that you cannot fulfil D.

I'm suggesting you shouldn't make a promise that would conflict with your existing duty.

And if by accident you do so, then you should not just smugly renege on the second promise. But are obligated to try to resolve the conflict.

For example, if D is a pre-existing duty to wash the dishes before my wife gets home from work, and I then promise to drive my seriously ill neighbour to the hospital instead because the ambulance has not turned up, do I not have to keep that promise because my duty to wash the dishes came first?

Your wife can choose to waive her right to the fulfilment of your promise to do the dishes; she can release you from that promise ( for today). Or your neighbour may consent to accept a substitute (?taxi?) that does not interfere with your other duty.

It seems to me that D only overrides the promise if the consequences of not fulfilling D are worse than the consequences of not keeping the promise.

You have no business letting your judgment of what you think is good get in the way of fulfilling your obligations.

But if through chance or incompetence you are totally unable to fulfil all your obligations, you may have to make a hard choice. If your choice were to break your promise to your wife, drive your neighbour to the hospital, and leave the dishes unwashed, and try to make it up to your wife afterward, I wouldn't blame you for that decision. But it's nothing to crow about.

For goodness' sake let us not start relying on 'common parlance'; the uneducated cannot be allowed to arbitrate in disagreements between the educated.

We are necessarily relying on words with which to communicate. If you start using words in a different sense from their usual sense (I.e from common parlance) then communication can get more difficult...

Such a person would usually be acting in their own interests and no-one else's, which would not be moral. But if they lied and manipulated in order to achieve better consequences overall, and did so knowingly and with that intention, then I would say their actions were moral.

But you were saying just now that they have duties to themselves, which presumably include a duty to act in their own interests...

Is there no evil that you will not commit and condone if it is done in service of your idol of "better consequences" ?

[EricPH]

I didn't ask 'what one's duties/obligations are', I asked what the process is by which you decide what they are. This is important because if you don't have an answer to this question, your opinions as to what moral duties we have are unsupported by any rational argument.

I feel the only way duties/obligations would work is if they became law. But it would seem a legal nightmare; trying to make laws about saving blind people from speeding cars or doing dishes. The only way this might work is if people chose to do these things willingly and voluntarily, because they love their neighbours as they love themselves. The Golden Rule.

[Good_Egg]

I feel the only way duties/obligations would work is if they became law. But it would seem a legal nightmare; trying to make laws about saving blind people from speeding cars or doing dishes. The only way this might work is if people chose to do these things willingly and voluntarily, because they love their neighbours as they love themselves. The Golden Rule.

I agree that duties are in a sense law-like. That a framework of duties needs to be as coherent, as well-defined as law. And desire for good outcomes just isn't.

So yes, there are good deeds better seen as freely-chosen praiseworthy acts than as duties.

CIN is asking a good question - how do we know which acts of virtue are duties ? And I think you're pointing to an answer - a test of coherence. Does the candidate-duty work as law ?

Are you a moral realist? I get the impression that you are. If so, then it's incumbent on you to explain what it is about the world that makes at least some of your moral judgments objectively true.

Yes, I think what I'm putting forward is a form of moral realism. That says that moral wrongness has real objective existence and can be perceived, although fallibly, by a faculty which we might call moral sense. Which some individuals may lack, in the same way that some are deaf or blind. And which can be drowned out by other "senses" in the same way that a quiet sound may not be heard accurately or at all against background noise.

That allows for the possibility that statements about right and wrong are objectively true or false, rather than being merely a matter of personal or cultural preference.

[EricPH]

Eternal moral truths should be rooted in the same justice for all people. We allow about nine million people to die every year from starvation, when rich countries squander billions on slimming products. About 700 million people live on less than two dollars a day. About eight hundred million people go to bed hungry. Yet in the civilised world we waste about 750 million tons of food a year.

Do we have a duty or obligation to share our wealth with those less fortunate?

[Good_Egg]

Do we have a duty or obligation to share our wealth with those less fortunate?

No. But it is a morally good and praiseworthy thing when someone freely chooses to do so.

Assuming that what they share is their own wealth rather than somebody else's.

[Belindi]

Do we have a duty or obligation to share our wealth with those less fortunate?

No. But it is a morally good and praiseworthy thing when someone freely chooses to do so.

Assuming that what they share is their own wealth rather than somebody else's.

Basic fairness , which very young children seem to know instinctively , demands there ought to be a very slight differential in wealth between the poorest and the richest.

I disagree with Good Egg and the richest ought to be taxed until their wealth is average. The process of levelling will have to be ongoing as naturally the ruling elite will be greedy.

The military will have to especially checked so that there is no possibility of a junta.
Sources of income will need policing.

I'd allow gambling within healthy limits but profits from investing in wealth acquired from gambling such as lotteries would be subject to the same restrictions as wealth acquired from work.

I'd allow inherited wealth but it would be restricted in the same way as profits from gambling.You could use your Mum's money for spending and having fun but if it's used for investing in a for -profit scheme the profit would be highly taxable.

[EricPH]

Do we have a duty or obligation to share our wealth with those less fortunate?

No. But it is a morally good and praiseworthy thing when someone freely chooses to do so.

It seems that the greater path to morality, is when the solution is given freely and willingly.
In theory, rich countries could place a higher tax on the wealthy. This would then be governed by laws and obligations. Very few people like paying extra tax, even if it is for a good cause.

Justice and morality are best served, when we freely and willingly give up some of our own perceived rights to help the less fortunate.

Where we live is like winning or losing the lottery. 800 million people on Earth go to bed hungry, they have lost the lottery, because of where they are born.

[LuckyR]

Eternal moral truths should be rooted in the same justice for all people. We allow about nine million people to die every year from starvation, when rich countries squander billions on slimming products. About 700 million people live on less than two dollars a day. About eight hundred million people go to bed hungry. Yet in the civilised world we waste about 750 million tons of food a year.

Do we have a duty or obligation to share our wealth with those less fortunate?

For those who are not sociopaths nor psychopaths, likely will receive more emotional benefit from helping than the monetary value of the assistance.

Thus for that group, it could be argued that it is in their best interest to help.