Does Philosophical Inquiry Lead to Truth?

[Jack D Ripper]

[my dog] has pretty much the best life possible. She has no better options.

Exactly. My point is the lack of options. We, humanity, have 'domesticated' (i.e. enslaved) dogs for many thousands of years. In the world we have built, there is no longer a 'natural' niche for animals, dogs included. But my main point is on-topic: the pursuit of truth. We ignore inconvenient or uncomfortable truths, like the enslavement of dogs, and maybe this avoidance is where we're going wrong?

Are children enslaved by their parents? Children are generally expected to do what they are told, at least to some extent. They do not have a choice in the matter; parents typically won't let them just eat whatever they want, and do whatever they want. Are parents right in this, or should children be allowed to do as they please?

If I treat my dog in the same way, for the same reasons a parent treats his or her children the way he or she treats them, is this wrong?

I have no interest in trying to justify what people have done with dogs throughout history. Much of it, I think, is wrong and should not have been done. Just as today, much of what is done with various animals should not be done.

I will, however, be happy to discuss what I am doing with my dog. I did not cause her to exist, nor have I created the world in which we live. I can only deal with things as they are, and am restricted to what I can possibly do. I cannot undo the actions of the past, nor do I control what other people do. I take no responsibility for the actions of others, who have done, and currently do, things of which I do not approve.

[Pattern-chaser]

Exactly. My point is the lack of options. We, humanity, have 'domesticated' (i.e. enslaved) dogs for many thousands of years. In the world we have built, there is no longer a 'natural' niche for animals, dogs included. But my main point is on-topic: the pursuit of truth. We ignore inconvenient or uncomfortable truths, like the enslavement of dogs, and maybe this avoidance is where we're going wrong?

Are children enslaved by their parents?

Children are not owned as slaves are. They are given progressively more freedom as they grow and learn. Slaves remain property, to be used as their owner sees fit. And they are never freed; they live their lives in captivity. I do not necessarily even condemn this. My point is the on-topic one: let's look at what we do honestly, and recognise the truth if we can. In the case of the dog example, let's not pretend our dogs do not live as our slaves. They do, and it's us who place and keep them in this state. That's the truth, I think.

[Seth_Gibson]

I just finished reading all those quotes you put in your post and skimmed the replies, so I know where you are coming from when you say this now, whereas before I did not. I do not know if that makes me informed enough to disagree with Hume yet. I only want to verify something you said in the replies. Marvin says the following:


To which you reply with this:


I assume what you say follows from what Hume says here:

That is not what I was thinking of.

Hume does not focus on the practical aspects of being ethical; he is focused on what ethics is and what its foundation is, how it works. This makes him very different from some others, like the ancient stoic and Epicurean philosophers, who were more interested in practice than theory.

So it would be more accurate to say that Hume writes about metaethics, not normative ethics.

If we look at the first two specific examples you mention, of the enslavement of black people and the treatment of gays, we can say that the first of those was related to false beliefs about black people, about their abilities and characteristics. Which is what you state in your next sentence:

In other words, Marvin's example regarding racism did not hold up because southerners did not know that negroes were not inferior.

Regarding the treatment of gay people, that can be directly traced to religion. Since you and I are in America, I will focus on the dominant religion here, though this is not unique to Christianity. The traditional Christian view comes straight from the Bible:


Leviticus 18:

22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.


Leviticus 20:

13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.


There are other verses that have been used by Christians who denounce homosexuality, but Leviticus 20:13 is unambiguous about what should be done with people who engage in homosexual acts. So, if one believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, that God is always right, then following the Bible, one would believe that men who engage in homosexual acts should be put to death.

Now, that is not based on one's feelings of humanity or benevolence; it is based on a set of religious beliefs.


Of course, Hume does not discuss the specific issue of homosexuality; he was not interested in giving a practical guide to ethics, but was interested in discussing what ethics is and what its foundation is. He may well have had the common prejudice of his society on that, due to the influence of religion on society, but one does not get that from what Hume says is the foundation of morality. And, indeed, his rejection of the "monkish virtues" is giving a direct example of him saying that one should not be basing one's ethics on false religious beliefs, that it is going against the natural sentiments people have.

I think that a normative position can be understood in a metaethical way. In both cases, there was a lack of information. Hume may have been against homosexuality as you said, but I think if given enough evidence he would be okay with it. Not that we can ever know that, since he did not write about normative ethics, but I agree that his dislike of monkish virtues leads one to independently conclude that homophobia is bad.

It has been common to try to manipulate people to get them to overcome their natural sentiments. For example, during wartime, it is common to demonize the enemy, to portray the enemy as less than human. This is so that the soldiers will be more willing to disregard any natural aversion to killing people. If they are not really fully human, then killing them isn't the same as killing their next-door neighbor.

Absolutely. There are many things that those in power can do to force others to commit atrocities. In his book the Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo argues that when it comes to war crimes and other evils, it is not the bad apples that sour the bunch -- It's the bad barrel. 80% of the book is summarized in this 20-minute video: Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of evil | TED Talk (I find it sad that they forced him to talk so fast. Our culture has a very short attention span these days.)

When a Nazi was captured by Americans and put on trial, they discovered that the Nazi was not some evil genius, but an ordinary man of average intelligence. He was quite agreeable in fact. The sad truth is that (aside from the small percentage of highly individualistic individuals in Zimbardo's studies) under the right circumstances, every person within a society can become the equivalent of a nazi -- no matter how normal they seem.

Can philosophy combat this sort of thing? Probably not. Philosophical inquiry is a very individualistic activity. As you said Jack, whatever conclusion one comes to will likely be completely different from the rest of society. Perhaps the philosopher would be part of the 10 percent of pure individuals, but it is hard to say. I do not know how true this is, but my robotics teacher said that courts do not let engineers and scientists engage in jury duty, because they are not swayed by emotional appeals. There might be some studies into this.

Of course, the Monkish virtues come into play, as racism is never good in principle, regardless of whether someone is inferior.

I don't agree with that at all. If it were true that black people were all stupid, and could not be intelligent, then there would be nothing wrong with believing that they were all stupid and could not be intelligent. What makes that wrong is the fact that it is factually wrong. If, for example, it were true of all black people that they were not intelligent enough to be doctors, then there would be nothing wrong with preventing them from becoming doctors. What makes it wrong to prevent black people from becoming doctors is the fact that (among other things) it is false that they are all not intelligent enough to be doctors.

The reason why I give no consideration to how rocks feel is because I have no reason to believe that they feel anything. Change that fact (of having no reason to believe they feel anything) and then the treatment of rocks would become a different matter. (This is because I do not wish to cause unnecessary pain; I have empathy, without which, I would not care about the treatment of others, no matter what I believed about them.)

Definitely. That is a good distinction which I did not make clear. There is a line to be drawn, however, between racism that is objectively correct, and racism that entails the enslavement of human beings. The racism of the southern slaveowner entails a belief that inferior individuals should be enslaved due to occupying a lower plane of existence. Of course, one can be a racist and still treat black people with respect, the same way that one treats one's dog with respect. Generally, however, it is implied that a racist person dislikes black people.

Clearly, racism is not objectively correct. There have been studies that correlate being black with having a lower IQ and committing a higher rate of crime (I heard that something like 80% of crimes are committed by blacks). Looking at those statistics in isolation, however, does not take into consideration correlation versus causation. Blacks are more likely to be poor and marginalized, which is the true cause.

P.S. You do not have to keep explaining the basics of Hume's empathetic argument in different ways. I will get to that later in this post.

I would have to read more into monkish virtues because "fasting, penance, mortification, (and) self-denial" all sound very much like an unegoistic ideal, whereas racism would affirm a southerner's superiority. I would also need a more precise notion of Hume's idea of "common Humanity", or common human sentiments of morality which the individual references to make choices. Perhaps Hume can provide the structure for other philosophers to fill in the gaps in his system, and I wonder whether this has already happened.

I don't think Hume thought it very necessary to tell people what "benevolence" was. I don't think he was using such terms in any unusual way.

Your way of looking at this seems very alien to what Hume was up to. He did not think about this in terms that Nietzsche looked at things.

My problem was that since human psychology is so malleable as Zimbardo shows, benevolence can be interpreted to mean different things at different times. I am certain Hume has a counter-argument to this, so it would be best for me to read the book.

...
It makes sense that you would say that because Hume is an empiricist. There can be no deductive, Platonic, "proofs" within philosophy assuming that Hume is right (At least concerning matters of ethics). That is an attractive prospect, although I can see how you would get tired of rubbish. Too many philosophers start with axioms. I know axiology is one of the four branches of philosophy, or that is what I read.

My attitude on that has nothing to do with an appreciation for empiricism. Tell me, what is the difference between saying something is "self-evident" and begging the question?

Do not confuse this with the axioms in a system like Euclidian geometry. With that, one is dealing with a system, and for that, the axioms are defining the system one is discussing. How or even whether Euclidian geometry might apply to the real world is a separate matter from discussing the system itself.

Is it true that within a system of deductive logic there must be some initial axiom? If there are any a priori ethical principles one has, then there must be some axiom within the system. For example, the truth of Plato's Republic is predicated on the idea that the happiness of humans is worth pursuing. He considered the idea self-evident (happiness is synonymous with truth for him). One might try to improve his system by showing how happiness is worth pursuing, but then one would have to justify that based on some other system with an initial axiom. Hume did not believe that there could be any a priori ethical principles, which is how he cuts out initial axioms from the equation.

Maybe I am purporting a dichotomy between the empiricists and rationalists. I know there is more to it than that, as Kant was neither an empiricist nor a rationalist.

Regarding axiology, you seem to not understand the meaning of the term:

axiology

NOUN

mass noun
1 Philosophy
The study of the nature of value and valuation, and of the kinds of things that are valuable.

Axiology is ethics and aesthetics and anything else (if there is anything else) that pertains to value.

Yes. I had the wrong definition because of the way the name sounded.

Yes, and I suppose that combines with what you said about how philosophy should mimic science.

It is good to try to discover truths rather than to just make wild guesses. In that sense, yes, philosophy should mimic science. There are some philosophers who agree with this idea (e.g., Hume), and many who do not.

I wish more people were like Hume in that regard.

I am sure you know better than I do that a large portion of Kant's metaphysics is utterly disproven by modern physics. One would think that geniuses could come up with something better, but I guess we overestimate ourselves as a species.

I am not sure what you have in mind regarding Kant's metaphysics. But, regardless, I do not think his approach to philosophy is right.

As you probably know, at least some of what Kant wrote was a reaction to Hume, of him not liking what Hume said.

Indeed. Kant liked the idea of applying something categorically. Hume says in those quotes you gave that there are many exceptions to the rules we impose. It is up to human benevolence to sort out the mistaken rules. I am sure Kant hated Hume's subjective doctrine of empathy.

It makes me wonder how our experience of reality would change if biologists end up discovering designer babies, or the ability to improve the intelligence of current humans. Then we could design hyperempathetic/hyperintelligent superhumans that surpass us in every aspect of existence. I do not know what we would do then. If you had a computer that could let you change anything about yourself and your circumstances, would it be best to "improve" everything? Or is it necessary to strive toward a goal? I find it strange because this situation sounds so dystopian, and yet we strive to control our environment every day.

It is the kind of thing that could be used either for creating a dystopian society or for doing much good. Power can be used for either good or evil or something neutral. But I don't think people will ever be able to just make what they want; there are limits to what a biological thing can be. By that I mean, improving intelligence is likely possible (theoretically at this point), but infinite intelligence is not possible.

Science is worth the risk, but I can see how others think it arrogant to open up the pandora's box so to speak. The TV series unnatural selection does a good job of showcasing how human intervention can go wrong.

...


You are basing that on Hume's empathetic argument, right? What one values depends on one's emotion and not logic. Keep in mind that I am restating your conclusions without excepting them because I need to read the book and ruminate.

No. You alternate between asking and writing about me and about Hume. When you ask or write about me, I respond about me, not Hume.

My mistake.

This is the same as the prior case with empathy. I meant distinguishing between dogs and humans based on ethical reasons. It is okay to own a dog but not a human. Why? Or perhaps such is not categorically true. Maybe owning a dog does go against moral sentiment. Why would it though? Like I said earlier, I need more information on Hume's conception of moral sentiment or I am missing something else.

You are asking a question that involves a complicated answer. However, the answer has nothing to do with metaphysics. That is what I keep saying to you, that you keep refusing to accept.

When we distinguish between people and dogs, we can do that in very straightforward ways, in which we observe different appearances and different kinds of actions. This is all very ordinary, and is not dependent upon metaphysics.

I am not presently interested in arguing for whether it is right or wrong to own dogs, but it is more complicated than it appears at first, as "good" parents seem to treat their children in ways similar to how "good" pet owners treat their pets. In your question about whether it is right to own a human, what, exactly, is meant by that? And how is what is generally regarded as proper parenting different from owning children? One tells them what to do, controls what they eat, tells them when to sleep, etc. (One might, of course, say that children are not people, which one occasionally hears from parents regarding their troublesome offspring.)


Now, bad metaphysics could be improperly applied to such questions, and has been done in the past. For example, Descartes thought that animals were basically just biological machines that could not suffer, and consequently he acted accordingly. See:

Hume, as usual, took a more reasonable approach, as one knows about other people feeling pain and so forth in exactly the same way one knows that non-human animals feel pain; you can get a start on that at the link above, too. Hume's approach, though, was not to make any metaphysical claim about animals, but simply noted how we know about these things, about our judgements about other people feeling pain, how we know that about people being in pain are the same things we observe in animals (like dogs, which is an example Hume uses). That is, Hume was concerned with epistemology, not metaphysics in this.

Prejudging the matter with some metaphysical gobbledygook, that is not supported by good reasoning, can lead to all sorts of horrors. One could, as suggested by examples already mentioned, come up with some metaphysical nonsense about black people, women, children, or any other group one wants to exclude from consideration of decent treatment.

I do not know.

I will refer you back to my original response to this:

...

As for consciousness, what sort of test do you really do to determine if someone is conscious? I will answer for you (though feel free to correct me if I get this wrong): You judge by behavior. You do not directly detect consciousness at all in anyone other than yourself. So whether someone else really has consciousness or not is irrelevant to how you deal with them.
...

I am confident of this as the right answer because there seems to be no alternative that has any plausibility at all.

Notice in this, my question was one of epistemology, of how you know something, rather than some attempt at doing metaphysical speculation. I think you should focus on epistemology, not metaphysics.

The distinction Hume makes is between "is" and "aught" (I am not sure which work he makes this distinction in). Other philosophers have tried to argue that there is no distinction between "is" and "aught". You probably know their arguments better than I do, so for the time being I will trust that you are right. I do not have a strong reason for believing otherwise based on what you said to the objections I made.

I do disagree with the idea that we should be confident in our system because there does not seem to be any plausible alternative. If we were born in presocratic times, we might conclude that Heraclitus was right in concluding that the universe was always in flux, because no other philosopher could give a better theory at the time. Similarly, I just agreed with your theory because I have no plausible alternative, but I might read the book and disagree with everything in it, or agree with it before finding some better theory in another book. For those of us pursuing truth, our intellectual artillery might be insufficient when compared to the millennia of future insights humanity has to offer. We might disprove every other theory in the short lifespan of our generation as humans only to have the next generation completely revolutionize how people look at the world.

[Jack D Ripper]

Exactly. My point is the lack of options. We, humanity, have 'domesticated' (i.e. enslaved) dogs for many thousands of years. In the world we have built, there is no longer a 'natural' niche for animals, dogs included. But my main point is on-topic: the pursuit of truth. We ignore inconvenient or uncomfortable truths, like the enslavement of dogs, and maybe this avoidance is where we're going wrong?

Are children enslaved by their parents?

Children are not owned as slaves are. They are given progressively more freedom as they grow and learn. Slaves remain property, to be used as their owner sees fit. And they are never freed; they live their lives in captivity. I do not necessarily even condemn this. My point is the on-topic one: let's look at what we do honestly, and recognise the truth if we can. In the case of the dog example, let's not pretend our dogs do not live as our slaves. They do, and it's us who place and keep them in this state. That's the truth, I think.

I don't particularly have a problem with you saying that my dog is my slave. Even though it does not feel that way. It feels more like she is my daughter.

In the event of having a child who does not mature like an ordinary human, who never is capable of making his or her own way in the world, one has to take care of him or her for the rest of his or her life. Also, with a child, one takes care of them, typically in America, for 18 years (often there is additional support of one kind or another for longer). That is longer than one typically takes care of a dog.

Of course, in a legal sense, you are right that a dog is property, and a child is not. Even though the distinction is not as different as it may seem at first. But, yes, legally, I could have my dog put down for no reason. I could not do that legally with a human child. That seems unfair to me.

[Seth_Gibson]

Exactly. My point is the lack of options. We, humanity, have 'domesticated' (i.e. enslaved) dogs for many thousands of years. In the world we have built, there is no longer a 'natural' niche for animals, dogs included. But my main point is on-topic: the pursuit of truth. We ignore inconvenient or uncomfortable truths, like the enslavement of dogs, and maybe this avoidance is where we're going wrong?

Are children enslaved by their parents?

Children are not owned as slaves are. They are given progressively more freedom as they grow and learn. Slaves remain property, to be used as their owner sees fit. And they are never freed; they live their lives in captivity. I do not necessarily even condemn this. My point is the on-topic one: let's look at what we do honestly, and recognize the truth if we can. In the case of the dog example, let's not pretend our dogs do not live as our slaves. They do, and it's us who place and keep them in this state. That's the truth, I think.

This was part of my inspiration for the original post. The philosopher is attracted to "truth" by some strange magnetism, the true origin of which can only be perceived by dissecting the brain, so we cannot know whether the philosopher has an incentive to distort the objective Truth (by "truth" I mean a subjective truth, and not an objective Truth with a capital T). If Hume is right, then the will to truth is based on emotion (Is this Right Jack?). Our moral intuitions are cultivated by thousands of years of adaptation (Read our political nature for more info on this). Have you noticed how various cultures share the same values, such as fairness, ethnocentrism, or religiosity? To some extent, this is what Jack is referring to when he talks about the morality of shared humanity, only it extends across all of humanity rather than a few cultures.

The point is that the pursuit of truth should be a pragmatic activity that provides value, even though it leads to a human-centric interpretation of reality. Maybe you are right that I am wrongfully imprisoning my dog, and I am owning him out of convenience rather than an attempt at righteousness. In this case, my actions are motivated by emotion, as are all my actions. I would, however, apply the same principle to you when it comes to asserting that I am not fair to my dog. As Avi Tuschman shows, fairness is something important to the survival of a small tribe. If the alpha male unfairly steals food from his group, then from a game theory perspective it is logical for them to ostracise him. That is why we have fairness built into our psyche. It was advantageous for our ancestors living in the savanna.

I am not saying that fairness is illogical, just as you say that owning a dog is not necessarily wrong. I am agreeing that our human-centric interests get in the way of objective truth.

[Jack D Ripper]

That is not what I was thinking of.

Hume does not focus on the practical aspects of being ethical; he is focused on what ethics is and what its foundation is, how it works. This makes him very different from some others, like the ancient stoic and Epicurean philosophers, who were more interested in practice than theory.

So it would be more accurate to say that Hume writes about metaethics, not normative ethics.

Primarily, yes. But to focus on something does not mean that one totally neglects other things. However, it does mean that those other things are given less attention.

If we look at the first two specific examples you mention, of the enslavement of black people and the treatment of gays, we can say that the first of those was related to false beliefs about black people, about their abilities and characteristics. Which is what you state in your next sentence:





Regarding the treatment of gay people, that can be directly traced to religion. Since you and I are in America, I will focus on the dominant religion here, though this is not unique to Christianity. The traditional Christian view comes straight from the Bible:


Leviticus 18:

22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.


Leviticus 20:

13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.


There are other verses that have been used by Christians who denounce homosexuality, but Leviticus 20:13 is unambiguous about what should be done with people who engage in homosexual acts. So, if one believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, that God is always right, then following the Bible, one would believe that men who engage in homosexual acts should be put to death.

Now, that is not based on one's feelings of humanity or benevolence; it is based on a set of religious beliefs.


Of course, Hume does not discuss the specific issue of homosexuality; he was not interested in giving a practical guide to ethics, but was interested in discussing what ethics is and what its foundation is. He may well have had the common prejudice of his society on that, due to the influence of religion on society, but one does not get that from what Hume says is the foundation of morality. And, indeed, his rejection of the "monkish virtues" is giving a direct example of him saying that one should not be basing one's ethics on false religious beliefs, that it is going against the natural sentiments people have.

I think that a normative position can be understood in a metaethical way. In both cases, there was a lack of information. Hume may have been against homosexuality as you said,

To be clear, I did not say that he was against it; I said that he may have been. For all I know, you may be against it, too. I don't know because I have not read anything in which he says anything about the subject. But if I had to make a guess, and if we could magically go back in a time machine and ask him, I would tend to guess that he may well have gone along with the prejudices of his society, particularly if he had no occasion to bother thinking about the matter. The reason I would guess that way is because he was a person, not a god, and people tend to go along with common ideas of their time and place. But he may surprise me on that; I do not know. We will have to go back in a time machine to find out. (But even at that, it may be that what he would say would depend on what time of his life we visited him, as people do sometimes change their minds about things. Hume, for example, changed his mind about religion from when he was a child to later on in life. I could say the same thing about myself.)

but I think if given enough evidence he would be okay with it.

That would be my guess, but we are dealing with matters that are very speculative here. It would be consistent with what he wrote. Certainly, one could follow Hume's ethical principles and be fine with it.

Not that we can ever know that, since he did not write about normative ethics,

His primary concern was not normative ethics (that is, not in his writings), but he did include some in his writings. His essay "Of Suicide" comes to mind as an example of some attention to normative ethics:

https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/704#lf0059_label_889

But he also included some normative ethical remarks in his writings that primarily focus on the nature of ethics, on meta-ethics ("meta-ethics" is a term that was not used until, I believe, the early 20th century), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals and A Treatise of Human Nature. In the first of those, he is primarily interested in the foundations of ethics, of what ethics is, rather than trying to give one principles to live by. In the second of those, one of the books (it was in three volumes) was on that topic, with the other two having to do with other aspects of human nature.

but I agree that his dislike of monkish virtues leads one to independently conclude that homophobia is bad.

Well, it leads us to conclude that one should not judge such matters based on what he called "false religion". From that, I would guess that he would probably be okay with it if he were alive today and we had a nice long chat about the matter.

Absolutely. There are many things that those in power can do to force others to commit atrocities. In his book the Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo argues that when it comes to war crimes and other evils, it is not the bad apples that sour the bunch -- It's the bad barrel. 80% of the book is summarized in this 20-minute video: Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of evil | TED Talk (I find it sad that they forced him to talk so fast. Our culture has a very short attention span these days.)

When a Nazi was captured by Americans and put on trial, they discovered that the Nazi was not some evil genius, but an ordinary man of average intelligence. He was quite agreeable in fact. The sad truth is that (aside from the small percentage of highly individualistic individuals in Zimbardo's studies) under the right circumstances, every person within a society can become the equivalent of a nazi -- no matter how normal they seem.

Can philosophy combat this sort of thing? Probably not. Philosophical inquiry is a very individualistic activity.

I think that is a description of bad philosophy. If it is just some personal preference or opinion, of what value is that? If philosophy is nothing more than that, then it is a total waste of time and you should have nothing whatever to do with it.

As you said Jack, whatever conclusion one comes to will likely be completely different from the rest of society. Perhaps the philosopher would be part of the 10 percent of pure individuals, but it is hard to say. I do not know how true this is, but my robotics teacher said that courts do not let engineers and scientists engage in jury duty, because they are not swayed by emotional appeals. There might be some studies into this.

There seems to be a preference, in the U.S. judicial system, to select jurors who have no relevant opinions and are as ignorant as possible. I hope my fate is never determined by a jury.

Definitely. That is a good distinction which I did not make clear. There is a line to be drawn, however, between racism that is objectively correct, and racism that entails the enslavement of human beings. The racism of the southern slaveowner entails a belief that inferior individuals should be enslaved due to occupying a lower plane of existence. Of course, one can be a racist and still treat black people with respect, the same way that one treats one's dog with respect. Generally, however, it is implied that a racist person dislikes black people.

One can be a racist and an abolitionist (as some abolitionists were), but I am not at all happy with the way you have expressed things in that paragraph. Perhaps instead of us discussing racism, it might be better for us to discuss prejudice. Prejudice is always wrong. Prejudice is judging before the facts are known. If you meet someone, and you do not yet have enough facts to determine whether the person is intelligent or not, then, if you make a judgement anyway, that would be prejudice.

Clearly, racism is not objectively correct. There have been studies that correlate being black with having a lower IQ and committing a higher rate of crime (I heard that something like 80% of crimes are committed by blacks). Looking at those statistics in isolation, however, does not take into consideration correlation versus causation. Blacks are more likely to be poor and marginalized, which is the true cause.

P.S. You do not have to keep explaining the basics of Hume's empathetic argument in different ways. I will get to that later in this post.



My problem was that since human psychology is so malleable as Zimbardo shows, benevolence can be interpreted to mean different things at different times. I am certain Hume has a counter-argument to this, so it would be best for me to read the book.

The book for his ethical theory is An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. He also discusses ethics in his earlier (and more difficult book) A Treatise of Human Nature.

Is it true that within a system of deductive logic there must be some initial axiom?

I am not sure what you are asking.

If there are any a priori ethical principles one has, then there must be some axiom within the system. For example, the truth of Plato's Republic is predicated on the idea that the happiness of humans is worth pursuing.

I am not sure I want to say this, as I am not really wanting to discuss Plato, but I don't think that is right. I think it would be more accurate to say that he thought that one should be interested in the health of one's soul, or, in more modern terms, mental excellence.

He considered the idea self-evident (happiness is synonymous with truth for him).

Where did you get that idea?

One might try to improve his system by showing how happiness is worth pursuing, but then one would have to justify that based on some other system with an initial axiom. Hume did not believe that there could be any a priori ethical principles, which is how he cuts out initial axioms from the equation.

Maybe I am purporting a dichotomy between the empiricists and rationalists. I know there is more to it than that, as Kant was neither an empiricist nor a rationalist.

Not everyone would classify Kant that way. I think if we used this to classify philosophers:

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rati ... mpiricism/

Using that as our standard, then Kant would be a rationalist.

Regarding axiology, you seem to not understand the meaning of the term:



Axiology is ethics and aesthetics and anything else (if there is anything else) that pertains to value.

Yes. I had the wrong definition because of the way the name sounded.

It is good to try to discover truths rather than to just make wild guesses. In that sense, yes, philosophy should mimic science. There are some philosophers who agree with this idea (e.g., Hume), and many who do not.

I wish more people were like Hume in that regard.

I am not sure what you have in mind regarding Kant's metaphysics. But, regardless, I do not think his approach to philosophy is right.

As you probably know, at least some of what Kant wrote was a reaction to Hume, of him not liking what Hume said.

Indeed. Kant liked the idea of applying something categorically. Hume says in those quotes you gave that there are many exceptions to the rules we impose. It is up to human benevolence to sort out the mistaken rules. I am sure Kant hated Hume's subjective doctrine of empathy.

This is another occasion when I am not happy with how you express matters, but I am not looking forward to trying to correct things. In this case, Kant believed that ethics is based on pure reason, evidently rejecting (though I do not recall him ever saying why) Hume's idea that feelings are the sole source of motivation for human actions. Also, Hume did not say that one should not follow rules. I think you should read Hume for what he has to say about this; you might find what he has to say about justice interesting, in which he suggests that one should follow the rules of justice, even though in particular instances it may not be for the best, because having such rules is for the best.

It is the kind of thing that could be used either for creating a dystopian society or for doing much good. Power can be used for either good or evil or something neutral. But I don't think people will ever be able to just make what they want; there are limits to what a biological thing can be. By that I mean, improving intelligence is likely possible (theoretically at this point), but infinite intelligence is not possible.

Science is worth the risk, but I can see how others think it arrogant to open up the pandora's box so to speak. The TV series unnatural selection does a good job of showcasing how human intervention can go wrong.

No. You alternate between asking and writing about me and about Hume. When you ask or write about me, I respond about me, not Hume.

My mistake.

You are asking a question that involves a complicated answer. However, the answer has nothing to do with metaphysics. That is what I keep saying to you, that you keep refusing to accept.

When we distinguish between people and dogs, we can do that in very straightforward ways, in which we observe different appearances and different kinds of actions. This is all very ordinary, and is not dependent upon metaphysics.

I am not presently interested in arguing for whether it is right or wrong to own dogs, but it is more complicated than it appears at first, as "good" parents seem to treat their children in ways similar to how "good" pet owners treat their pets. In your question about whether it is right to own a human, what, exactly, is meant by that? And how is what is generally regarded as proper parenting different from owning children? One tells them what to do, controls what they eat, tells them when to sleep, etc. (One might, of course, say that children are not people, which one occasionally hears from parents regarding their troublesome offspring.)


Now, bad metaphysics could be improperly applied to such questions, and has been done in the past. For example, Descartes thought that animals were basically just biological machines that could not suffer, and consequently he acted accordingly. See:

Hume, as usual, took a more reasonable approach, as one knows about other people feeling pain and so forth in exactly the same way one knows that non-human animals feel pain; you can get a start on that at the link above, too. Hume's approach, though, was not to make any metaphysical claim about animals, but simply noted how we know about these things, about our judgements about other people feeling pain, how we know that about people being in pain are the same things we observe in animals (like dogs, which is an example Hume uses). That is, Hume was concerned with epistemology, not metaphysics in this.

Prejudging the matter with some metaphysical gobbledygook, that is not supported by good reasoning, can lead to all sorts of horrors. One could, as suggested by examples already mentioned, come up with some metaphysical nonsense about black people, women, children, or any other group one wants to exclude from consideration of decent treatment.




I will refer you back to my original response to this:



I am confident of this as the right answer because there seems to be no alternative that has any plausibility at all.

Notice in this, my question was one of epistemology, of how you know something, rather than some attempt at doing metaphysical speculation. I think you should focus on epistemology, not metaphysics.

The distinction Hume makes is between "is" and "aught" (I am not sure which work he makes this distinction in). Other philosophers have tried to argue that there is no distinction between "is" and "aught". You probably know their arguments better than I do, so for the time being I will trust that you are right. I do not have a strong reason for believing otherwise based on what you said to the objections I made.

No. I am not sure where to begin on this. There is a famous paragraph in A Treatise of Human Nature by Hume in which he states:

I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, [470]that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/342#Hume_0213_1117


The standard interpretation of this (which I think is completely wrong) is that one cannot go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement. That one cannot derive moral statements from matters of fact.

One of the reasons I believe that is wrong (aside from the fact that that is not actually stated in that paragraph) is that Hume himself goes from "is" statements to "ought" statements in his ethical theory. That is, he derives his ethical theory from matters of fact. Indeed, without doing that, one would either not have an ethical theory at all, or one would just be pulling the theory out of one's ass. (In case that last word gets deleted for you, we can substitute, for everything after the last comma in that sentence, "or one would just be making stuff up that is based on nothing.").

I do disagree with the idea that we should be confident in our system because there does not seem to be any plausible alternative. ...

My expressed confidence is not in a system, but in one fact:

...
As for consciousness, what sort of test do you really do to determine if someone is conscious? I will answer for you (though feel free to correct me if I get this wrong): You judge by behavior. You do not directly detect consciousness at all in anyone other than yourself. So whether someone else really has consciousness or not is irrelevant to how you deal with them.

...

Just to be perfectly clear, this fact: The idea that other people are conscious is derived from their behavior. That is not a system, it is a lone proposition.

My confidence in that fact is derived from other facts, such as the fact that one cannot directly detect consciousness in other people. Consequently, if one comes to such a conclusion, it must be indirectly. So, how could one do this? Consider, do people generally conclude that rocks are conscious? They do not, correct? Is that because rocks don't do anything unless acted upon by something external to them? Is that relevant to why someone might think that rocks are not conscious and people are?

[Pattern-chaser]

Maybe you are right that I am wrongfully imprisoning my dog...

No, I didn't say "wrongfully"; I intentionally did not make or reach that conclusion. The truth matters.

I am agreeing that our human-centric interests get in the way of objective truth.

Or perhaps objective truth - which is nothing but a hypothetical chimera, in practice, for real human beings in the real world - gets in the way of our human-centric interests?

[Jack D Ripper]

Maybe you are right that I am wrongfully imprisoning my dog...

No, I didn't say "wrongfully"; I intentionally did not make or reach that conclusion. The truth matters. 😉

I am agreeing that our human-centric interests get in the way of objective truth.

🤔 Or perhaps objective truth - which is nothing but a hypothetical chimera, in practice, for real human beings in the real world - gets in the way of our human-centric interests? 🤔

Somehow the first part of your post does not seem to go with the second. The second part seems to suggest that maybe the truth doesn't matter.


One thing I am sure of, and that is that most discussions, of what truth is, are not productive and they don't matter. I hope I am not inadvertently starting one of those with this post.


Anyone interested in "truth" can start with this:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/

If this does start a discussion of what truth is, I will be in the bar somewhere else. I will, though, leave one parting thought, and that is that there are different kinds of "truth", which is illustrated with the following example:

Imagine someone says, "Santa Claus lives at the South Pole." Someone else replies, "No, that isn't true; Santa Claus lives at the North Pole."

Now, the statement "Santa Claus lives at the North Pole" is, in one sense (at least), true, in that it fits the story of Santa Claus, unlike the claim about the South Pole. In another sense, though, it is not true, because there is no Santa Claus, so he does not live anywhere.

But, if any of you pursue this, do not expect me to be a major participant. I don't like being unduly irritated while drinking Scotch. I can be irritated enough with other conversations.

[Seth_Gibson]

I think that a normative position can be understood in a metaethical way. In both cases, there was a lack of information. Hume may have been against homosexuality as you said,

To be clear, I did not say that he was against it; I said that he may have been. For all I know, you may be against it, too. I don't know because I have not read anything in which he says anything about the subject. But if I had to make a guess, and if we could magically go back in a time machine and ask him, I would tend to guess that he may well have gone along with the prejudices of his society, particularly if he had no occasion to bother thinking about the matter. The reason I would guess that way is because he was a person, not a god, and people tend to go along with common ideas of their time and place. But he may surprise me on that; I do not know. We will have to go back in a time machine to find out. (But even at that, it may be that what he would say would depend on what time of his life we visited him, as people do sometimes change their minds about things. Hume, for example, changed his mind about religion from when he was a child to later on in life. I could say the same thing about myself.)

but I think if given enough evidence he would be okay with it.

That would be my guess, but we are dealing with matters that are very speculative here. It would be consistent with what he wrote. Certainly, one could follow Hume's ethical principles and be fine with it.

Not that we can ever know that, since he did not write about normative ethics,

His primary concern was not normative ethics (that is, not in his writings), but he did include some in his writings. His essay "Of Suicide" comes to mind as an example of some attention to normative ethics:


But he also included some normative ethical remarks in his writings that primarily focus on the nature of ethics, on meta-ethics ("meta-ethics" is a term that was not used until, I believe, the early 20th century), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals and A Treatise of Human Nature. In the first of those, he is primarily interested in the foundations of ethics, of what ethics is, rather than trying to give one principles to live by. In the second of those, one of the books (it was in three volumes) was on that topic, with the other two having to do with other aspects of human nature.

Okay, so he was not entirely separated from the immediate application of his ideas.

Absolutely. There are many things that those in power can do to force others to commit atrocities. In his book the Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo argues that when it comes to war crimes and other evils, it is not the bad apples that sour the bunch -- It's the bad barrel. 80% of the book is summarized in this 20-minute video: Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of evil | TED Talk (I find it sad that they forced him to talk so fast. Our culture has a very short attention span these days.)

When a Nazi was captured by Americans and put on trial, they discovered that the Nazi was not some evil genius, but an ordinary man of average intelligence. He was quite agreeable in fact. The sad truth is that (aside from the small percentage of highly individualistic individuals in Zimbardo's studies) under the right circumstances, every person within a society can become the equivalent of a nazi -- no matter how normal they seem.

Can philosophy combat this sort of thing? Probably not. Philosophical inquiry is a very individualistic activity.

I think that is a description of bad philosophy. If it is just some personal preference or opinion, of what value is that? If philosophy is nothing more than that, then it is a total waste of time and you should have nothing whatever to do with it.

I am not sure why you think I meant that. My argument was that in a society with absolute conformity to authority and a lack of individuality, evil prospers. Philosophy requires some degree of tolerance with regard to ideas that diverge from orthodoxy. A society with the problems I mentioned would not tolerate a philosopher. Philosophy is only good for preventing an Orwellian dystopia, just like we concluded before.

As you said Jack, whatever conclusion one comes to will likely be completely different from the rest of society. Perhaps the philosopher would be part of the 10 percent of pure individuals, but it is hard to say. I do not know how true this is, but my robotics teacher said that courts do not let engineers and scientists engage in jury duty, because they are not swayed by emotional appeals. There might be some studies into this.

There seems to be a preference, in the U.S. judicial system, to select jurors who have no relevant opinions and are as ignorant as possible. I hope my fate is never determined by a jury.

We have come a long way since Socrates was put on trial, but I guess some things never change.

Definitely. That is a good distinction which I did not make clear. There is a line to be drawn, however, between racism that is objectively correct, and racism that entails the enslavement of human beings. The racism of the southern slaveowner entails a belief that inferior individuals should be enslaved due to occupying a lower plane of existence. Of course, one can be a racist and still treat black people with respect, the same way that one treats one's dog with respect. Generally, however, it is implied that a racist person dislikes black people.

One can be a racist and an abolitionist (as some abolitionists were), but I am not at all happy with the way you have expressed things in that paragraph. Perhaps instead of us discussing racism, it might be better for us to discuss prejudice. Prejudice is always wrong. Prejudice is judging before the facts are known. If you meet someone, and you do not yet have enough facts to determine whether the person is intelligent or not, then, if you make a judgement anyway, that would be prejudice.

Forgive me if I am not precise with my words. Prejudice is probably a better word for what I am talking about.

Clearly, racism is not objectively correct. There have been studies that correlate being black with having a lower IQ and committing a higher rate of crime (I heard that something like 80% of crimes are committed by blacks). Looking at those statistics in isolation, however, does not take into consideration correlation versus causation. Blacks are more likely to be poor and marginalized, which is the true cause.

P.S. You do not have to keep explaining the basics of Hume's empathetic argument in different ways. I will get to that later in this post.

My problem was that since human psychology is so malleable as Zimbardo shows, benevolence can be interpreted to mean different things at different times. I am certain Hume has a counter-argument to this, so it would be best for me to read the book.

The book for his ethical theory is An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. He also discusses ethics in his earlier (and more difficult book) A Treatise of Human Nature.

I plan on reading his Principles of morals after the one on epistemology.

Is it true that within a system of deductive logic there must be some initial axiom?

I am not sure what you are asking.

An initial premise is all I mean (highlighted in red):

Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal.

If there are any a priori ethical principles one has, then there must be some axiom within the system. For example, the truth of Plato's Republic is predicated on the idea that the happiness of humans is worth pursuing.

I am not sure I want to say this, as I am not really wanting to discuss Plato, but I don't think that is right. I think it would be more accurate to say that he thought that one should be interested in the health of one's soul, or, in more modern terms, mental excellence.

Then I will not encumber you with why I thought that. I can see why you would say that.

He considered the idea self-evident (happiness is synonymous with truth for him).

Where did you get that idea?

I got it from Plato's Republic. At the beginning of the book, Glaucon and Adeimantius challenge Socrates to show how morality is satisfying in and of itself, without reference to the external benefits that come with the appearance of goodness. If a man merely appears good but is actually bad, then it must be shown that the man is not as happy as the unrecognized man of moral excellence. Socrates does this by showing that to know the good is to do the good and to do the good is to achieve happiness. The guardian philosophers are incorruptible because they enjoy the intelligible realm of truth rather than the shallow benefits that come with the appearance of goodness.

Do not feel obligated to correct me if you think I am wrong here.

One might try to improve his system by showing how happiness is worth pursuing, but then one would have to justify that based on some other system with an initial axiom. Hume did not believe that there could be any a priori ethical principles, which is how he cuts out initial axioms from the equation.

Maybe I am purporting a dichotomy between the empiricists and rationalists. I know there is more to it than that, as Kant was neither an empiricist nor a rationalist.

Not everyone would classify Kant that way. I think if we used this to classify philosophers:

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.

Using that as our standard, then Kant would be a rationalist.

Yes. Kant would be a rationalist if that definition is the standard.

Indeed. Kant liked the idea of applying something categorically. Hume says in those quotes you gave that there are many exceptions to the rules we impose. It is up to human benevolence to sort out the mistaken rules. I am sure Kant hated Hume's subjective doctrine of empathy.

This is another occasion when I am not happy with how you express matters, but I am not looking forward to trying to correct things. In this case, Kant believed that ethics is based on pure reason, evidently rejecting (though I do not recall him ever saying why) Hume's idea that feelings are the sole source of motivation for human actions. Also, Hume did not say that one should not follow rules. I think you should read Hume for what he has to say about this; you might find what he has to say about justice interesting, in which he suggests that one should follow the rules of justice, even though in particular instances it may not be for the best, because having such rules is for the best.

I should really stop making claims about those philosophers without first reading their works.

The distinction Hume makes is between "is" and "aught" (I am not sure which work he makes this distinction in). Other philosophers have tried to argue that there is no distinction between "is" and "aught". You probably know their arguments better than I do, so for the time being I will trust that you are right. I do not have a strong reason for believing otherwise based on what you said to the objections I made.

No. I am not sure where to begin on this. There is a famous paragraph in A Treatise of Human Nature by Hume in which he states:

I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, [470]that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.

The standard interpretation of this (which I think is completely wrong) is that one cannot go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement. That one cannot derive moral statements from matters of fact.

One of the reasons I believe that is wrong (aside from the fact that that is not actually stated in that paragraph) is that Hume himself goes from "is" statements to "ought" statements in his ethical theory. That is, he derives his ethical theory from matters of fact. Indeed, without doing that, one would either not have an ethical theory at all, or one would just be pulling the theory out of one's ass. (In case that last word gets deleted for you, we can substitute, for everything after the last comma in that sentence, "or one would just be making stuff up that is based on nothing.").[/quote]

That makes sense. I inherited the mistake from several secondary sources I read in the past. This was before I heeded your warning about getting infected with the mistakes of external material.

I do disagree with the idea that we should be confident in our system because there does not seem to be any plausible alternative. ...

My expressed confidence is not in a system, but in one fact:

...
As for consciousness, what sort of test do you really do to determine if someone is conscious? I will answer for you (though feel free to correct me if I get this wrong): You judge by behavior. You do not directly detect consciousness at all in anyone other than yourself. So whether someone else really has consciousness or not is irrelevant to how you deal with them.

...

Just to be perfectly clear, this fact: The idea that other people are conscious is derived from their behavior. That is not a system, it is a lone proposition.

My confidence in that fact is derived from other facts, such as the fact that one cannot directly detect consciousness in other people. Consequently, if one comes to such a conclusion, it must be indirectly. So, how could one do this? Consider, do people generally conclude that rocks are conscious? They do not, correct? Is that because rocks don't do anything unless acted upon by something external to them? Is that relevant to why someone might think that rocks are not conscious and people are?

In other words, your interpretation of the facts cannot be disproven by other systems, because you are not affirming some system yourself?

I do not have a better definition of consciousness when observing it in others.

[Jack D Ripper]

...

I think that is a description of bad philosophy. If it is just some personal preference or opinion, of what value is that? If philosophy is nothing more than that, then it is a total waste of time and you should have nothing whatever to do with it.

I am not sure why you think I meant that.

That was a response to this:

... Philosophical inquiry is a very individualistic activity. ...

If that is all that it is, then it is trivial. Masturbation is a very individualistic activity.

...

I am not sure what you are asking.

An initial premise is all I mean (highlighted in red):

Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal.

That is not an axiom. That is simply a premise. As is your second premise ("all men are mortal").

I am not sure I want to say this, as I am not really wanting to discuss Plato, but I don't think that is right. I think it would be more accurate to say that he thought that one should be interested in the health of one's soul, or, in more modern terms, mental excellence.

Then I will not encumber you with why I thought that. I can see why you would say that.

Where did you get that idea?

I got it from Plato's Republic. At the beginning of the book, Glaucon and Adeimantius challenge Socrates to show how morality is satisfying in and of itself, without reference to the external benefits that come with the appearance of goodness. If a man merely appears good but is actually bad, then it must be shown that the man is not as happy as the unrecognized man of moral excellence. Socrates does this by showing that to know the good is to do the good and to do the good is to achieve happiness. The guardian philosophers are incorruptible because they enjoy the intelligible realm of truth rather than the shallow benefits that come with the appearance of goodness.

Do not feel obligated to correct me if you think I am wrong here.

Okay. I have a favor to ask of you. Ask your ethics teacher about this, to see if he or she agrees with your characterization. Of course, if you use different words, this may make a considerable difference in the reply.

Not everyone would classify Kant that way. I think if we used this to classify philosophers:





Using that as our standard, then Kant would be a rationalist.

Yes. Kant would be a rationalist if that definition is the standard.

This is another occasion when I am not happy with how you express matters, but I am not looking forward to trying to correct things. In this case, Kant believed that ethics is based on pure reason, evidently rejecting (though I do not recall him ever saying why) Hume's idea that feelings are the sole source of motivation for human actions. Also, Hume did not say that one should not follow rules. I think you should read Hume for what he has to say about this; you might find what he has to say about justice interesting, in which he suggests that one should follow the rules of justice, even though in particular instances it may not be for the best, because having such rules is for the best.

I should really stop making claims about those philosophers without first reading their works.

That is a good idea.

No. I am not sure where to begin on this. There is a famous paragraph in A Treatise of Human Nature by Hume in which he states:




The standard interpretation of this (which I think is completely wrong) is that one cannot go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement. That one cannot derive moral statements from matters of fact.

One of the reasons I believe that is wrong (aside from the fact that that is not actually stated in that paragraph) is that Hume himself goes from "is" statements to "ought" statements in his ethical theory. That is, he derives his ethical theory from matters of fact. Indeed, without doing that, one would either not have an ethical theory at all, or one would just be pulling the theory out of one's ass. (In case that last word gets deleted for you, we can substitute, for everything after the last comma in that sentence, "or one would just be making stuff up that is based on nothing.").

That makes sense. I inherited the mistake from several secondary sources I read in the past. This was before I heeded your warning about getting infected with the mistakes of external material.

You get a pass on this. Pretty much every student of philosophy is told that about Hume on "is" and "ought". Almost no one reads the book first, seeing it in context, making one's judgement on that. One is told, "this is what Hume is saying..." and then, since one has not previously read it or thought about it, one tends to accept what the professor says, as he or she should know what he or she is talking about.

Does my response about this surprise you?

My expressed confidence is not in a system, but in one fact:





Just to be perfectly clear, this fact: The idea that other people are conscious is derived from their behavior. That is not a system, it is a lone proposition.

My confidence in that fact is derived from other facts, such as the fact that one cannot directly detect consciousness in other people. Consequently, if one comes to such a conclusion, it must be indirectly. So, how could one do this? Consider, do people generally conclude that rocks are conscious? They do not, correct? Is that because rocks don't do anything unless acted upon by something external to them? Is that relevant to why someone might think that rocks are not conscious and people are?

In other words, your interpretation of the facts cannot be disproven by other systems, because you are not affirming some system yourself?

I do not understand that question.

If you have some story about how you come to the conclusion that other people are conscious, that is not about their behavior, then, please, present it. Until you do, I will continue supposing that you believe your mother is conscious because of the behavior of your mother, and not for some other reason. (Indeed, I expect that, if your mother stops behaving, stops doing things, you will believe that she is no longer conscious.) If you have a story that is about something else, that comes to that conclusion (that she is conscious), and makes any sense at all, seriously, I would be interested in reading it.

I do not have a better definition of consciousness when observing it in others.

I do not understand that statement either in this context. My question was not about what consciousness was, but was about how you decide if something you encounter is conscious or not. When you encounter some object, say, a rock, a tree, a dog, a person, a house, or whatever, which of these do you suppose are conscious, and which are not, and why do you make the determination that you make?

[Pattern-chaser]

No, I didn't say "wrongfully"; I intentionally did not make or reach that conclusion. The truth matters.


Or perhaps objective truth - which is nothing but a hypothetical chimera, in practice, for real human beings in the real world - gets in the way of our human-centric interests?

Somehow the first part of your post does not seem to go with the second. The second part seems to suggest that maybe the truth doesn't matter.


One thing I am sure of, and that is that most discussions, of what truth is, are not productive and they don't matter. I hope I am not inadvertently starting one of those with this post.

Truth, in philosophical terms, is a complicated beastie, and I agree with you, that there is no reason to divert this discussion into that particular black hole. But truth, as an everyday concept, is valuable and useful to real people. We all know what it means. We all know that it's a diffuse concept, which is therefore defined somewhat vaguely, but it remains useful to us, even in that imprecise form. In fact, only imprecision (generality) can properly describe such a concept, I think.

So, on the one hand, I assert that "the truth matters", and I mean that real, everyday, truth matters. But on the other hand, as soon as someone uses the "O"-word, things start to fall apart. "Objective", in all its meanings and senses, describes something that is very difficult (for the milder definition of "objective") to achieve, or (for the harder definitions) quite impossible. It is problematic, and proffers no useful meaning. It's just a (bogus) way of making one's text sound more authoritative and therefore convincing. Regarding truth, my view is that we should stick to the ordinary everyday variant, and leave the philosophy (of truth, and of objectivity) alone.

[Seth_Gibson]

...


I am not sure why you think I meant that.

That was a response to this:

... Philosophical inquiry is a very individualistic activity. ...

If that is all that it is, then it is trivial. Masturbation is a very individualistic activity.

Well, obviously philosophical inquiry is more than that. I meant "individualistic" in the colloquial sense that those engaging in philosophy deviate from society in their beliefs. I am not taking the subjectivist position that philosophy is a matter of personal preference.

From here on I will try to overexplain rather than underexplain because underexplaining ends up creating a lot more work.

...
An initial premise is all I mean (highlighted in red):

Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal.

That is not an axiom. That is simply a premise. As is your second premise ("all men are mortal").

Got it.

I got it from Plato's Republic. At the beginning of the book, Glaucon and Adeimantius challenge Socrates to show how morality is satisfying in and of itself, without reference to the external benefits that come with the appearance of goodness. If a man merely appears good but is actually bad, then it must be shown that the man is not as happy as the unrecognized man of moral excellence. Socrates does this by showing that to know the good is to do the good and to do the good is to achieve happiness. The guardian philosophers are incorruptible because they enjoy the intelligible realm of truth rather than the shallow benefits that come with the appearance of goodness.

Do not feel obligated to correct me if you think I am wrong here.

Okay. I have a favor to ask of you. Ask your ethics teacher about this, to see if he or she agrees with your characterization. Of course, if you use different words, this may make a considerable difference in the reply.

I formated for clarity and added another paragraph before sending it to my ethics prof. Here is the result:

At the beginning of the book, Glaucon and Adeimantius challenge Socrates to show how morality is satisfying in and of itself, without reference to the external benefits that come with the appearance of goodness. If a man merely appears good but is actually bad, then it must be shown that the bad man is not as happy as the unrecognized man of moral excellence. Socrates does this by showing that to know the good is to do the good and to do the good is to achieve happiness. The guardian philosophers are incorruptible because they enjoy the intelligible realm of truth rather than the shallow benefits that come with the mere appearance of goodness.

This is because life satisfaction is divided up into three levels. The bottom level is pain. The middle level is neutral. The top-level is true happiness. When people pursue money or power, they are moving up from the bottom level to the middle level. The Guardians engaging in philosophical dialectic, however, are moving up from the middle level to the top level.

That makes sense. I inherited the mistake from several secondary sources I read in the past. This was before I heeded your warning about getting infected with the mistakes of external material.

You get a pass on this. Pretty much every student of philosophy is told that about Hume on "is" and "ought". Almost no one reads the book first, seeing it in context, making one's judgement on that. One is told, "this is what Hume is saying..." and then, since one has not previously read it or thought about it, one tends to accept what the professor says, as he or she should know what he or she is talking about.

Does my response about this surprise you?

It does. I have an exam coming up soon and my ethics prof. says there is an "is," "aught" distinction with Hume. Clearly, I need to go with what the prof. says for the exam, but It is interesting to think that even the experts get it wrong.

In other words, your interpretation of the facts cannot be disproven by other systems, because you are not affirming some system yourself?

I do not understand that question.

My statement was a response to you saying this:

Just to be perfectly clear, this fact: The idea that other people are conscious is derived from their behavior. That is not a system, it is a lone proposition.

My confidence in that fact is derived from other facts, such as the fact that one cannot directly detect consciousness in other people...

Before I said that we should not be confident in our system of philosophy just because all the other systems are inadequate. Our system might be wrong, and we can go all our lives challenging our philosophy, but it might never be enough given the time we are born into (just as it is hard to grasp philosophical truths if one is before Thales in 630 BC). You clarified that your confidence is not born out of a system, but of a relation of facts in the form of a proposition, and your confidence is therefore merited. That is how I took your meaning at least.


The rest of my reply is a rather long work in progress. I will finish it tomorrow because I am tired.

[Jack D Ripper]

...

In other words, your interpretation of the facts cannot be disproven by other systems, because you are not affirming some system yourself?

I do not understand that question.

My statement was a response to you saying this:

Just to be perfectly clear, this fact: The idea that other people are conscious is derived from their behavior. That is not a system, it is a lone proposition.

My confidence in that fact is derived from other facts, such as the fact that one cannot directly detect consciousness in other people...

Before I said that we should not be confident in our system of philosophy just because all the other systems are inadequate. Our system might be wrong, and we can go all our lives challenging our philosophy, but it might never be enough given the time we are born into (just as it is hard to grasp philosophical truths if one is before Thales in 630 BC). You clarified that your confidence is not born out of a system, but of a relation of facts in the form of a proposition, and your confidence is therefore merited. That is how I took your meaning at least.

...

I am willing to listen to someone tell me some other story about how one knows that other people are conscious (in fact, I specifically asked you to correct me if I was wrong in what I claimed about how you know your mother is conscious), but I don't expect any of these other stories to be believable. This is because of experience of encountering various claims in the past. And thinking about the issue.

Of course, if someone has a plausible story that it isn't due to behavior, then I would be interested in knowing about such a story. It would be a surprising and interesting thing.

However, I am confident that no such story is forthcoming.


I could say the same kind of thing regarding an argument for the existence of god. Most philosophers these days regard all of the traditional arguments for the existence of god as fallacious (and they are right on that), so if someone were to present another argument for the existence of god, one would naturally expect it, too, to be fallacious, particularly if it were some random person online, as it is doubtful that some random person online is going to do better than many hundreds of philosophers have done in trying to prove the existence of god. It would be unreasonable to expect a good argument for the existence of god to be presented on this forum or anywhere else online. Usually, what one finds is that someone is rehashing an already refuted argument, pretending that it is really new, or pretending that the old argument has not been refuted.

[Jack D Ripper]

To add to what I just posted, here I expressed the idea that you infer that someone is conscious from their behavior, in which you can see that I specifically mention that you should correct me if I give the wrong answer for what you are doing:

...

If we already determine that it is against morality to harm a sentient being, then the question of the 12-year-old's sentience is important. What if, instead of a 12-year-old you were throwing into the meat grinder, it was an android which looked and talked and thought like a human. Except this android has no experience of reality beyond the deterministic code it was given by a computer. Clearly, if we believe that sentience is important, then we are unlikely to categorize the 12-year-old as sentient. We might though, in which case we should treat the android with respect. This is how a metaphysical question can affect ethics.

Perhaps one might say that "consciousness" is just a word describing a "reality" which we are far from understanding, all under the guise of injecting some sort of meaning where there is a lack. However, If this were the case, then surely one cannot distinguish between an animal and a human. If we do not describe them metaphysically, then we have no way to integrate them into an ethical framework. If I say "My name is Seth. This is my dog Petey" you know exactly what I am talking about and you agree upon that interpretation of reality. If instead, I say that "my name is Seth. This is my owner Petey." you might think me a bit strange and wonder why you even talked to me. Those two metaphysical interpretations are completely different, and they demonstrate a completely different ethic regarding what the relationship between me and my dog should look like. We must determine what constitutes "ownership”. One can only do that by empirically looking at examples and coming to a conclusion based on self-consistent principles.

I don't know what you are trying to get at with your dog. I have no problem with your dog owning you, if that is the case. I hope your master treats you appropriately, as any owner of a pet ought to treat his or her pets well.

As for consciousness, what sort of test do you really do to determine if someone is conscious? I will answer for you (though feel free to correct me if I get this wrong): You judge by behavior. You do not directly detect consciousness at all in anyone other than yourself. So whether someone else really has consciousness or not is irrelevant to how you deal with them.

...

Were I not confident in the answer, I would not have answered the question for you, for how you determine that someone is conscious.


Now, if you believe my confidence is misplaced, please, give me a plausible alternate theory for how one would make such a determination. I defy you to come up with anything that has any real plausibility at all. (If you could do it, I would be very interested in reading it.)

[Seth_Gibson]

To add to what I just posted, here I expressed the idea that you infer that someone is conscious from their behavior, in which you can see that I specifically mention that you should correct me if I give the wrong answer for what you are doing:

...




I don't know what you are trying to get at with your dog. I have no problem with your dog owning you, if that is the case. I hope your master treats you appropriately, as any owner of a pet ought to treat his or her pets well.

As for consciousness, what sort of test do you really do to determine if someone is conscious? I will answer for you (though feel free to correct me if I get this wrong): You judge by behavior. You do not directly detect consciousness at all in anyone other than yourself. So whether someone else really has consciousness or not is irrelevant to how you deal with them.

...

Were I not confident in the answer, I would not have answered the question for you, for how you determine that someone is conscious.


Now, if you believe my confidence is misplaced, please, give me a plausible alternate theory for how one would make such a determination. I defy you to come up with anything that has any real plausibility at all. (If you could do it, I would be very interested in reading it.)

That is exactly what I was working on last night, but it was getting late so I had to save my work. Here it is:

If you have some story about how you come to the conclusion that other people are conscious, that is not about their behavior, then, please, present it. Until you do, I will continue supposing that you believe your mother is conscious because of the behavior of your mother, and not for some other reason. (Indeed, I expect that, if your mother stops behaving, stops doing things, you will believe that she is no longer conscious.) If you have a story that is about something else, that comes to that conclusion (that she is conscious), and makes any sense at all, seriously, I would be interested in reading it.

I do not have a better definition of consciousness when observing it in others.

I do not understand that statement either in this context. My question was not about what consciousness was but was about how you decide if something you encounter is conscious or not. When you encounter some object, say, a rock, a tree, a dog, a person, a house, or whatever, which of these do you suppose are conscious, and which are not, and why do you make the determination that you make?

I am not claiming that I know my mom is conscious. I am saying that I do not think I can give a better method of determining whether something is conscious other than judging by behavior (I am saying you are right. You convinced me.) I can give it a shot, although my sufficient condition for consciousness might just be an extended version of yours depending on your definition of "behavior". I think my condition can be illustrated by way of a hypothetical example:

If one assumes materialism is true, and my mom's brain functions the same way my brain does, then I must determine by custom that she is conscious (Even though I can never be certain). Let us say that one day, I have my doubts about my mom's humanity, so I decide to cut into her skull with a scalpel after giving her a very strong sedative. In her head I find a brain-shaped computer controlling the rest of her human body where her normal brain should be, which causes me to freak out and go run to tell my brother over in the next room. He tells me that a long time ago he moved her brain over to our dog Petey, and transferred all of the data from her brain onto the brain shaped computer. I slowly come to realize that my transhumanist brother turned mom into an android.

He assures me that she is perfectly conscious within the computer with a sly smile. Everything about the computer functions as a brain would in developing new experiences, changing beliefs, and forgetting information. All that quirky brain stuff is exactly the same. In other words, her behavior is exactly the same as it was before. Likewise, I reflect that Mom might still be conscious within Petey, but I can never know that because she cannot communicate with me (unless I hook her up to an electroencephalogram to see if her brain is working).

This is what I meant when I said it depends on what you mean by behavior. Under normal circumstances, if there is no change in my mom's behavior, then there is no reason to doubt her humanity. I go on judging her as conscious based upon her behavior. If I live with a transhumanist brother, though, then I might have my doubts regardless of my mom's behavior, because he might have gone behind my back and turned her into an android. The condition for consciousness, therefore, can be more precisely stated as the belief that someone possesses a normally functioning human brain. If my mom falls into a coma, and I have no way to communicate with her, then I cannot rely on her behavior. As before, I must use an electroencephalogram to see if her brain is working.

Other complexities come up if one concludes that consciousness is determined by behavior. In my above example, is the android conscious, or the dog? As for the android with the human body, the question is whether transferring the information constitutes an abstraction or not. I remember an interview with the philosopher Susan Schneider I listened to a few weeks ago (link below). Susan argues that consciousness is not mere information that can be abstracted. Consciousness is a physical process that goes on in the brain. The mistake is similar to the philosophy of mathematics in thinking that the universe is an equation. The brain is not an abstract program, just as it is not an equation. I leave it to you to decide whether this assessment is correct because I do not know.

As for Petey, I have not studied the mind-body problem deeply, so I do not know whether my mom retains her consciousness if her brain is transferred to my dog. Intuition tells me that the brain is the conduit for the experience of reality, especially if materialism is true, but I am only holding a tentative position on that until I get your next reply. I would guess that my weakest premise is that others must be conscious if their brains function the same as mine because there seems to be an epistemological leap of faith here. As you said, I do not detect consciousness in others.

Would Hume be able to answer these sorts of questions? Regardless, I will find out when I have more time to devote to reading his enquiries after finals.

https://omny.fm/shows/factually-with-ad ... nshumanism