The Five Metaethical Positions: - Noncognitivism/expressivism: Moral statements are neither true nor false. Evaluative predicates do not even purportedly refer to any sort of property, nor do evaluative statements assert propositions. - Error theory/nihilism: Moral statements (that imply that something has an evaluative property) are all false. - Subjectivism: Some moral statements are true, but not objectively. For a thing to be good is for some individual or group to (be disposed to) take some attitude towards it. - Moral Naturalism: There are objective moral properties, but they are reducible. Evaluative truths are reducible to descriptive truths. Additionally, moral statements can be justified empirically. - Moral Non-Naturalism/Intuitionism: There are objective moral properties, and they are irreducible. Evaluative truths are not reducible to descriptive truths. Additionally, at least some moral truths are known intuitively. Why are these the only five broad options? Take a moral statement, like "Torturing an infant for fun is wrong." This is either (1) neither true nor false, (2) false, or (3) true. If you think it's true, the next question is whether the statement's truth depends on the attitudes of observers. If so, you're a subjectivist. If not, you're a moral realist: you believe in objective morality. Whether you think moral truths are reducible to descriptive truths is what decides whether you're a moral naturalist or non-naturalist; but either way, you're a moral realist.
These are not the only metaethical positions you can take. A quietist could hold that the question of whether there are stance-independent moral facts is conceptually confused, and that an accurate understanding of our concepts and language would lead to the recognition that the question wasn't a meaningful one in the first place. This would result in rejecting moral realism without endorsing any of the traditional three forms of antirealism. The restrictive set of options you present here only make sense in the context of mainstream analytic philosophy. But there are philosophical traditions that fall outside the scope of analytic philosophy, but are within it yet are critical of certain presuppositions that philosophers tend to make, that would reject this framework, e.g., pragmatism, and views that draw on e.g., Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy, and quietistic approaches. I am a proponent of these approaches, which take a different metaphilosophical approach to philosophy, and don't generally fall within the framework Huemer outlines. For instance, in my case, I do not believe there are stance-independent moral facts *and* I reject error theory, subjectivism, and noncognitivism. As such, I am a living example that the claim that these are the only antirealist positions is not true. I mean no disrespect, but I am not sure why you are so insistent on this. Simply because Huemer makes this claim, doesn't mean his claim is correct. Huemer isn't the final authority on which positions are available to antirealists. Don Loeb provides an alternative that doesn't fit the traditional three categories, as does Gill. Both are distinguished philosophers who are no less authoritative than Huemer. So it's not clear why Huemer's word on this matter should be taken at face value. Whether or not there are only three forms of antirealism is a contested philosophical claim.
@@ReverendDr.Thomas I believe it is the psychological attitude that justification for or against any moral belief seems either untenable or irrational. So it is skepticism towards moral knowledge itself.
@@ReverendDr.Thomas I didnt coin anything buddy lol clearly you aren't familiar with the philosophical literature. Refer to SEP entry on anti-realism which explicitly states one could be both a moral skeptic and moral realist. It simply has to do with justification and moral antirealism contains no epistemological clause. Pyrrhonian moral skepticism avoids the dogmatic belief that there are or aren't any moral facts. They are agnostic on the proposition that all moral claims are false, whilst denying that we have justification to believe in any moral claims. This could be due to the problem of the criterion or other skeptical scenarios. So it has to do with our epistemic access to moral facts if they exist.
@@ReverendDr.Thomas This is my take on morality, it's similar to yours: Morality is our attempt to categorize our actions as "right" or "wrong" respective to some goal (God's will, human health and happiness, etc). In this sense, it doesn't matter if a religion is true or not, the fact human beings choose which moral systems to care about or try to follow (or can be compelled/raised to believe one) means necessarily that the statement "morality is objective" is rendered practically meaningless. Morality is a belief/perspective, it's not a property like color: I can't have been raised seeing the sky as green but then choose to see it as blue later, but I could be raised to believe gay marriage is "wrong" because my religion says so and then choose to believe it's "right" later because I think it makes more sense to use human health and freedom as the basis of my moral system (and have a religious worldview that more accurately reflects this). Aren't our moral systems arbitrary then? Not entirely, because human beings overwhelmingly care about the same things: human well-being; that is, the health and happiness of themselves and others and their freedom to experience love, beauty, and truth. Are those things objective or subjective? They're a mix of both, and they aren't rigidly defined which is why moral disagreement exists. Like all moral systems, choosing to participate in this moral system would still ultimately be up to you (though, people are so strongly inclined towards this kind of moral system that it borders on not being a choice). What compels people to modify their actions/make sacrifices for this moral system? The moral system centers around what they value; people are willing to make great sacrifices for the well-being of others and themselves, and that's an example of them participating in this moral system (risking my life to save somebody, eating food you don't like to stay healthy, etc). So was the holocaust wrong? Yes, it needlessly and cruelly hurt and killed lots of people, so if you care about human well-being then it was awful. But how do you convince a Nazi that it's wrong, can't they REALLY believe in a moral system that says genocide is good? Sure, they could, and no matter how objective you think morality is, the Nazi COULD ALWAYS do that and you would have no basis to tell them they're wrong (saying "my morality is objective and it says you're wrong" wont change anything) other than to point out that their moral system is based on misrepresentations of reality (Nazi lies, propaganda) and is logically inconsistent, which both the moral objectivist and somebody like me would have to do. I think my understanding of morality accounts for moral differences/confusions, the ways people talk and think about morality, the way we experience morality, our ultimate desire to adhere to moral systems, and the ways we can develop those systems. But I don't think it's a realist perspective.
35:16 On the critique against subjectivism. If you had other values should you conform to those. It's unclear which you the second "you" is referring to. Hypothetical me or actual me. Actual me disagrees with hypothetical me per the hypothetical. So it's important. I think realist sneak in objectivism here. It's like "would it be objectively correct to do this if you held such and such values" but that's not the subjectivists claim
Wow, Huemer has been doing a lot of these discussions lately. Credit to Huemer for taking the time to do so. Since I disagree with almost everything Huemer says about moral realism, I'll have to give this a listen and come back with what will almost certainly be many criticisms.
I will answer your comments a little bit later in Joe's Channel(Majesty of Reason), I found interesting that you didn't understood what an intuition and/or seeming is, Huemer just clarified that during the Debate, but ok... I will come back here too probably to criticize your comments as well.
@@DavidRibeiro1 When you say " I found interesting that you didn't understood what an intuition and/or seeming is," What do you mean? What are you basing this claim off of?
When listening to your discussion of "intuition, I am drawn to the book "the hidden spring" (solms). In summary the foundation of consciousness is a region of the midbrain, which drives our cognition to action by 7 feelings; (poorly summarized here as); fear, grief/separation, frustration, lust, caring, play and seeking. Evolution has adapted our cortex to "listen" to external senses, internal senses and the 7 affects to maintain homeostatic balance. That people universally "feel opposed" to a child in pain or threat, is unsurprising.
A few years ago if you had asked if I would put on watchlist a video talking about moral realism...I would have said what's moral realism?...but times change and am really interested in this topic. Still shaping my view, currently an anti-moralism person, but persuaded by many moral realism arguments. Thanks for the content.
It's telling that even when you acknowledge that you're straw-manning the anti-realist view, you don't stop doing it. Undermines the point of the video (or at least the question mark in the title).
Speaking subjectively, I really enjoyed this video, I found it to be a great discussion on a topic it’s easy to get lost on. Moral subjectivism seems to be the easier to believe but less exciting option, I mean no one need become defensive if I say I believe such and such is wrong for some reason that makes sense to me, if I maintain it’s just my personal opinion and need not be anybody else’s. Moral realism on the other hand is more challenging, if I take the stance I believe such and such is morally wrong and that my view is in line with an objective fact, I’m putting myself in a higher moral position than anybody who does not believe such and such is morally wrong. Objectively speaking, Emerson and Dr Huemer present a very good discussion that is of great intellectual worth. But I can’t be sure that is objectively true, and not just an extrapolation of my own subjective views. Anyway, philosophy? Why not.
A very good and insightful discussion. Also good arguments. And I say that as someone who is probably oppossed to most (or at least a good chunk) of your views.
Have you ever had David Bentley Hart on? He has a decent grasp on a classical theistic view of reality without committing too hard in any particular direction. He's no Thomist. You might also like talking to him about Christian universalism.
Great conversation! Thank you for sharing it. Related to the morality and God problem you were talking about, I tend to think the better solution is divine conceptualism + divine simplicity, so as a theist you have no problem rejecting nominalism and moral anti-realism. (Of course, these positions have other difficulties.)
Emerson, this is my take on morality. You can tell me if I'm crazy because I don't think it's realism but I don't see much of an objection to it in this video: Morality is our attempt to categorize our actions as "right" or "wrong" respective to some goal (God's will, human health and happiness, etc). In this sense, it doesn't matter if you're religious or not, the fact human beings choose which moral systems to care about or try to follow (or can be compelled/raised to believe one) means necessarily that the statement "morality is objective" is rendered practically meaningless. Morality is a belief/perspective, it's not a property like color: I can't have been raised seeing the sky as green but then choose to see it as blue later, but I could be raised to believe gay marriage is "wrong" because God forbids it and then choose to believe it's "right" later because I think it makes more sense to use human health and freedom as the basis of my moral system. Aren't our moral systems arbitrary then? Not entirely, because human beings overwhelmingly care about the same things: human well-being; that is, the health and happiness of themselves and others and their freedom to experience love, beauty, and truth. Are those things objective or subjective? They're a mix of both, and they aren't rigidly defined which is why moral disagreement exists. Like all moral systems, choosing to participate in this moral system would still ultimately be up to you (though, people are so strongly inclined towards this kind of moral system that it borders on not being a choice). What compels people to modify their actions/make sacrifices for this moral system? The moral system centers around what they value; people are willing to make great sacrifices for the well-being of others and themselves, and that's an example of them participating in this moral system (risking my life to save somebody, eating food you don't like to stay healthy, etc). So was the holocaust wrong? Yes, it needlessly and cruelly hurt and killed lots of people, so if you care about human well-being then it was awful. But how do you convince a Nazi that it's wrong, can't they REALLY believe in a moral system that says genocide is good? Sure, they could, and no matter how objective you think morality is, the Nazi COULD ALWAYS do that and you would have no basis to tell them they're wrong (saying "my morality is objective and it says you're wrong" wont change anything) other than to point out that their moral system is based on misrepresentations of reality (Nazi lies, propaganda) and is logically inconsistent, which both the moral objectivist and somebody like me would have to do. I think my understanding of morality accounts for moral differences/confusions, the ways people talk and think about morality, the way we experience morality, our ultimate desire to adhere to moral systems, and the ways we can develop those systems. But I don't think it's a realist perspective.
The section on theism was particularly interesting. I'd like to hear more about the theism/anti-realism issue. I'm often confused when theists say that without God, objective morality doesn't exist, when their theory also rests on moral relativism. Furthermore, God commands all kinds of moral absurdities (e.g. Abraham being instructed to kill his son Issac) and we're supposed to think they aren't absurd because God said so. But why think that God couldn't command you to do something immoral? Kierkegaard was honest enough to accept this possibility. Also, adding heaven and hell into the equation doesn't alter the theists' anti-realist position since one could subjectively want to avoid hell and desire to go into heaven. So if God commanded me to do X and avoid Y then, on anti-realism, I'd follow his orders for completely non-moral reasons such as subjectively wanting to please Him. I think Huemer was right in saying that just because God is an interesting, powerful and exceptional commander, doesn't mean that he's right. The government is an interesting, powerful and exceptional commander, not everything they say is right, either.
@Corporate Overlord Thanks for the reply. I agree with what you've said. I just wanted to point out that, on theism, objective morality depends on God's commands and I worry that this makes them relative (for the theist). I pretty much agree that some things are brute facts and ontologically basic. It's hard to prove what these ontologically brute facts are in the moral case, but one decent candidate seems to be 'It is wrong to hurt innocent people for fun.' Hard to see how that could be wrong. On the issue about the government, I was just making a comparison. It seems that morality has to be something more than what some commanding force tells me to do (God, government, peers etc). Craig objects to this, he says that it is not God's commands which make something moral, but God's nature. The problem I have with this is that the bible has too many instances of God doing awful crap. Am I now supposed to believe that the awful things he does are suddenly right because theists tell me so? And why should I think that?
There are a lot of different ways to measure the morality of any given situation... the tricky part is determining which ones to apply.... it's basically like comparing apples and oranges... if I apply the "rulers" to measure a specific situation... let's say, the trolley problem.. there are several different moral dimensions at play: in-action/guilt/compassion/utilitarianism. There is some kind of calculus that goes on in everyone's head when they decide what to do. And... that's what judges do in courts of law. They apply a variety of rulers... to decide whether or not someone is guilty of something... and if they are guilty, how guilty are they.
Philosophical arguments like the contingency argument do take us to omnipotence, the supreme unbounded necessary being of unlimited power grounding all reality …
I am a nihilist and a nominalist. I don't think moral truths have anything to do with objective truth. I don't think that any meaning is objective. I am not playing along with the fiction that there are moral truths, but deny them when I'm alone with me. I'm not just playing word games either and I find it rather irrational to say, that things are what they appear to be and that we should start from there, instead of asking for the burden of proof. There are countless examples, even in everyday life, that things are not what they appear to be. I don't just start from there. Why do I still act, as if moral truths exist? Because I'm not gonna impose my wordlview on others. Their subjective experiences, their explanations about the world and their decisions are based on real reasons. Whether they have a reasonable justification is not on me to evaluate. But it isn't on the universe either. Acting in accordance with some kind of morality, serves a purpose. Being moral is pragmatically justified. And even if there is no epistemic justification available, I have a reason to behave morally good. Religion is like that too. Religion serves hope, meaning and purpose and is therefore pragmatically justified. The difference is, that I don't go that step further and call it true on top of that, when I'm incapable to justify such a claim on epistemic grounds. It's useful and that's it. Battery acid on anybody's face is not useful for anybody's face. This is universal, but it is subjective nonetheless. Is this a problem? No. I don't mind whether morals are actually real or objective. They are useful. It's more along the lines of word games, to render pragmatic justifications truth. Religions do that. So, to me it seems more like ideology to claim, that moral realism is somehow coherent, than to say, that not believing in a claim because it cannot be demonstrated to be true being rendered as ideology. It appears to me like that, therefore, I start from there and call it fundamental, is not a valid pathway. These are appeals to intuition.
Aren't we capable, and don't we have actual examples, of changing our minds about any given "objective" truth? If so, then in what makes us think that "objectivity" is something we can identify in the first place? How would we know it when we have it and when we don't? "Objectivity" is an incoherent idea, in both ethics and epistemology. We are convinced of what we are for the reasons we find justified.
Hey Emerson, just come across your channel and subscribed. I am curious to hear you both expressing (acceptable levels of) ridicule of the position I currently hold (nihilism). What are the best technical works on realism that you can suggest, papers and books if you have any thoughts. Obviously I will need to tackle Huemer!
Looking forward to this! I'm so lucky to have interviewed both of you for @Sentientism, of course. Here's my conversation with Mike in case of interest: th-cam.com/video/O6lNEdVcohY/w-d-xo.html
I think defining subjective in terms of what is contingent upon an attitude has certain issues. Let's say that I am blind. The claim "there are no colors" would not be contingent upon my attitude, but could we say that it's a subjective claim? Or someone who has daltonism who is claiming the world is black and white, something which is not contingent upon their attitude(they may hate or love that form of perception), would be making an objective claim? Hardly.
I think morality doesn't exist an any "absolute" or objective sense. In fact, such a statement is as nonsensical to me as saying, "Absolute democracy exists." Or, "Objective baseball exists." It seems to me that these are all inventions of conscious minds. Were all minds to disappear from the universe, then so too would baseball, democracy, morality, etc. These things require minds to exist in any meaningful way. I'm a Social Contract moral theorist. For me, morality is created to allow for the Social Contract to exist. It allows us to develop working definitions of "good" and "bad" in a moral sense. I define Social Contract as the mutually enjoyed benefits of social living created by voluntary giving up or agreeing not to use certain freedoms. I believe morality requires more than one sentient mind interacting with each other to exist.
If the “wrongness” that we attach to immoral actions is NOT perceived or even known about, is it still objectively wrong? For example: is abortion wrong only when we know about it, or even when fetuses naturally abort. If no one is in the forest to hear (perceive) the tree fall, then does it make a sound?
If you’re a realist, then yes: Bad states of affairs are still bad without any moral agents there to judge them as such. It’s the same with any other objective thing (e.g. a rectangular object still has four sides even if no one observes it).
@@EmersonGreen I’m a little skeptical of comparing the “rectangleness” of an object and the “badness” of an action/inaction. Hume wrote on the math-moral analogy and suggested that there are no motivations driving ones beliefs about mathematics, nor are we in disagreement about rectangular objects (mathematics) the same way that we are about morality, nor does morality admit the same kind of proof as mathematics. 🤔 What are your thoughts?
@@JudeLind I’m not sure intuition and reflection constitute proof in the same way as a mathematical proof. Math is mind independent specifically because it is distinct (and sometimes even runs counter to) our intuitions.
"I conclude then, that though the differences between people's ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite. But one word before I end. I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did - if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house." C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity 1:18:58
1:56:15 Cuz Plato is wrong and Aristotle is right. Forms are in things (as the principle of actuality), and give things the intelligible structure and nature they have, which is then limited to a specific, imperfect being via matter (the principle of potency) and you come into contact with the forms through your intellect via abstraction.
At 15:45, Emerson claims that it seems like he perceives wrongness. I am baffled by this. What would it mean to perceive "wrongness"? How could that even be something that someone perceives, and why would you be inclined to take such a possibility seriously? Compare to your experience of eating food. When you eat something you like, do you think you are "perceiving tastiness" in it? I don't. I think that when we eat things, it triggers various psychological mechanisms in our brain, among these certain affective and experiential states; tastiness is a feature of (or just is one of) these mental states, not of the things we're eating. We're not perceiving tastiness out there in the world. Food doesn't have "tastiness." We just enjoy the taste of some foods, and those taste experiences are psychological states, not features of the things we're eating. Just the same, why think you're seeing "wrongness" out there? Why not instead suspect that the "wrongness" you're "perceiving" is a feature of your own psychological states, and your own mind interacting with the world? It almost seems as though moral realists are engaged in a strange kind of projective illusion, where they have a psychological experience or inference of some kind, e.g., "that's bad" or a negative emotion or something, and then project these experiences or inferences onto the world, as though the things that are prompting them to think or feel these way themselves have the properties of badness or negativity, rather than the badness or negativity being a feature of their own psychological states.
@@EmersonGreen Gotcha. I hope expressing bafflement isn't an indication that I'm upset or anything. I study this topic *because* I find differences between people super interesting. So I'm very curious about what moral experiences are like for different people. I can't fathom what it would be like to seem to perceive wrongness, and am really interested in what other people's moral phenomenology is like.
Huemer makes many of the same claims he made when he appeared a few days ago on Majesty of Reason’s channel to discuss this topic with Don Loeb. I already provided extensive commentary there on why Huemer is mistaken about most of the things that he says. First, Huemer claims that the only possible antirealist positions are noncognitivism, error theory, and subjectivism. This is not true. There are a variety of other positions antirealists can take: (a) Antirealists can deny that whether there are stance-independent moral facts turns on semantic claims about the meaning of ordinary moral claims. Since all three forms of antirealism Huemer describes rely on semantic analyses, such antirealist claims wouldn’t fall into any of those categories. For instance, antirealists can endorse metaethical indeterminacy about folk semantics, arguing that there is no determinate fact about whether moral claims specifically fit with subjectivist, error theoretic, or noncognitivist analyses. (b) Antirealists can deny that questions about whether moral facts are stance-independent or not are meaningful. This would yield a kind of metaethical quietism. (d) Antirealists can maintain that moral facts are incoherent, in accordance with Loeb’s proposal moral incoherentism. This represents an alternative to Huemer’s categories. Indeed, Huemer just had a discussion with Loeb, who has written about incoherentism here: Loeb, D. (2008). Moral incoherentism: How to pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2, pp. 355-386). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. I did not see any rebuttals or arguments from Huemer that would show that Loeb’s position is impossible. As such, it’s puzzling to me that Huemer continues to maintain that there are only three possible antirealist positions. This simply isn’t true.
For antirealists, moral claims that attribute a positive evaluative property are either: 1) neither true nor false, 2) false, 3) true, but not objectively. Those are the three options. Nothing you've said here undermines that.
@@lanceindependent Do you just mean a combination of these three in different contexts (i.e. some moral claims are just expressions of emotion, some are commands, some are subjectively true, some are false, etc.)? Because if not, I have no idea what that's supposed to mean
@@EmersonGreen This point didn't originate with me. Please have a look at this paper by Michael Gill: Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234. Gill argues that in addition to the traditional accounts available for our analysis of moral claims, one possibility is that there is no determinate fact of the matter about whether moral claims best fit a cognitivist or noncognitivist analysis, objectivism or subjectivism, and so on. For comparison, there may be no fact of the matter about whether, when people say "it's going to rain," that they're communicating a claim that commits them to any particular account of quantum mechanics. It could be, as Gill observes, that answers to certain kinds of questions just aren't relevant to and don't figure into certain kinds of utterances. The same could, in principle, be true for ordinary moral claims. It could be that there's just no fact of the matter about whether such claims function to refer to stance-dependent or stance-independent facts. Second, as I've pointed out, one's antirealist position does not require that you have a position on what ordinary people mean when they make moral claims. Third, take the statement you provide here: "moral claims that attribute a positive evaluative property are either: " There are still more possibilities for an antieralist. (1) It's possible that there is no distinctive category of "moral claims," such that one could provide any kind of answer as to whether moral claims do or don't do any particular thing. That is, one can deny that the very notion of a "moral claim" is a category about which there can be determinate or coherent answers. This would be a kind of second-order quietism that rejects the presupposes implicit in the way Huemer frames the possibilities (2) What about moral claims that *don't* attribute a positive evaluative property? What if there are moral claims that aren't attributing positive or negative evaluative properties at all? How would you categorize those?
@@EmersonGreen //Do you just mean a combination of these three in different contexts// No. That would be metaethical pluralism. //Because if not, I have no idea what that's supposed to mean// Perhaps not, but that doesn't mean that I haven't already provided an example of an alternative to the three possibilities outlined by Huemer. I already provided an explanation of indeterminacy in one of my previous comments to you. You didn't respond to it, so maybe you didn't see it. I'd be happy to explain indeterminacy, but you could also check out Gill's paper on the topic: Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234. I also have a blog post that mentions indeterminacy and that specifically argues against Huemer's claim that there are only three forms of antirealism. It's called "comparing apples to error theory," and you can see it on my blog, Lance Independent. I don't think TH-cam will let me send links, but I'd be happy to send you a link. It's a short article, so it wouldn't take too much time to have a look. The examples I provide in that article do not even exhaust the alternative possibilites to Huemer's list of three possibilities. At least part of the problem is that Huemer's framework only makes sense within the context of a specific view about the nature of meaning and language, a view I reject. Questions about whether there are "stance-independent moral facts," simply do not, on my view, turn on semantic analysis of moral claims. Note in all three cases: noncognitivism, subjectivism, and error theory, the rejection of moral realism turns in part on empirical claims about what people mean when they make moral claims. But I don't think whether moral realism is true depends on what people mean when they make moral claims, so I don't think antirealism requires a commitment to any of these positions.
great to see long, in-depth discussions on such big and interesting ideas - however: you don't seem to be making any sound arguments for your position. you only seem to be making error filled arguments against alternative positions. for what it's worth - my 'intuition' tells me that human morality ('moral truth' even) is most definitely subjective
I'm surprised the fictionalist stance strikes you both as totally incongruous. There are many an example of using a not-totally true language that is nevertheless very useful in many contexts that is still approximately justified in using them... Ie, free will, intentional stance, Newtonian mechanics, many concepts in economics, to think of a few.
Not totally true is different than wholly false. And Newtonian mechanics is true in a certain domain. The analogy between fictionalism in moral talk and Newtonian mechanics breaks down because one has some truth (Newton) and the other doesn’t (moral discourse under fictionalism).
@@landon5105Talk is pragmatic: the speaker makes a certain impact upon the listener (and often upon themselves, in a self-reinforcing way). If moral talk 'works' in the intended way in upholding certain attitudes and behaviors, it's not 'wholly false' in the sense of being far off the mark (as Newtonian mechanics would be in describing high-energy phenomena) despite being always false in the sense that the claim to objectivity implicit in any moral claim is unwarranted (as Newtonian mechanics, in a non-empty universe, always offers merely an approximation, albeit a close one).
I look at morality (ethical evaluatives + directives) as metaphysically real as chairs or biological species. Such categories are made up (not real), but they contain objective content nonetheless. This is why I don't like the standard realist - anti-realist framing in metaethics. Morality's real in one sense, but then not in another.
In the example of kids lighting a cat on fire, Dr. Huemer is wrong. The dog, as an observer, definitely sees the action as wrong. If you doubt it, just run the experiment. Dogs perceive the emotional status of others; they have a brain and mirror neurons. Also, they can express moral outrage. The dog will hear the screams of the cat and will try to stop the burning. The dog does not react to the noise; he reacts to the pain expressed in the screams.
39:00 This is kind of actually why I'm inclined towards anti-realism. After all, regardless of the existence of 'moral fact', I would still have emotion, desires, and preferences. I would still find the Nazis repulsive. Whether or not there are some 'objective moral facts' of the matter is kind of irrelevant. After all, if there are objectively moral facts on the matter, then you could be wrong about them. In that regard, if tomorrow someone proved objectively that the holocaust was actually morally good all else being the same, I would still find it repulsive and I would still act accordingly.
It seems that the theist has two options for the grounding of objective moral facts. Either, they are grounded in the divine will, or the divine nature. On the “nature” view T”the divine will is what constitutes obligation, the moral facts come from the divine nature.
Emerson, you are correct. One of my favourite philosophers of religion was keith Yandell. He was both a platonist and a theist. I should have qualified what I said and added the caveat that the options I gave above are typically what theists are comfortable with. I tend to take the view that moral facts are grounded in God’s nature, a close runner up is platonism.
@@EmersonGreenScoffing at nonbelievers and strawmanning them, why doesn't this sound like anything new? You're way too quick to dismiss the analogy with theism. You accuse anti-realists of always questioning the most plausible claim whenever this is a moral claim, but you always propose the most widespread dogmas (the prohibition on torturing children, etc.) as the moral claim in question, thinking, 'surely he won't dare to deny _that_ '. This unfairly puts the interlocutor at the risk of being quoted out of context (especially in non-philosophical settings) as not caring about grave crimes, and places onto them the additional burden of defending their condemnation of such crimes at the same time as their metaethical stance. Secondly, these extreme examples are far from the kind of moral dilemmas that come up in the day to day of ordinary people. Moral systems aim to be all-encompassing and deliver verdicts about any and all courses of action (or clearly designate a non-moral domain). Should I tell someone I care about what I really think about their outfit? What should I do with a found wallet? All of food ethics? There's no clear right or wrong on many issues, let alone an explicit way to discern between moral and non-moral norms. You might get universal agreement on specific atomic claims, but the challenge is coming up with a practicable, _consistent_ system of morality with wide applicability. Not even Christians can provide such with definitive certainty. Everyone always ends up deferring to 'moral intuition', i.e. personal preference. You also make an arbitrary distinction between biblical norms, which can be immediately dismissed as soon as one rejects the divine justifier, and others that, on the contrary, _really_ are objective. However, I venture that all normative claims ever made, even biblical ones (or especially biblical ones, which would be controversial unless imposed by authority), must have some grounding in utility (the utility of certain people at a certain time). Even if a moral claim is the product of (arational) evolution, this mere fact suggests that the claim was biologically useful in some way. In any case, behavioral change is no quick and easy task. To question any moral dogma and adjust one's subsequent behavior accordingly, it helps to be aware of its origin and justification. Finally, present-day concerns might be grounds for upholding traditional norms even after rejecting divine justification. E.g. gay marriage: even if you don't believe it's wrong, it might still be harmful to you if the 'right to marriage' is extended. Married couples might get an advantageous tax treatment, so you as a bachelor or heterosexual spouse might get disadvantaged. One can argue, from a purely legalistic/human-rights perspective, that the ideal principle of equal treatment trumps these materialistic concerns. But it doesn't hurt to be aware of one's hierarchy of personal preferences. Ultimately, it's for the political (hopefully democratic) process to decide and 'universalize' any norm.
Loved this thanks Emerson, I was surprised to hear at the end that Mike believes in eternal souls... although I should have had a hint when he mentioned, after my conversation with him @Sentientism th-cam.com/video/O6lNEdVcohY/w-d-xo.html, that we "didn't even get a chance to talk about my beliefs on reincarnation!" :). I haven't read his work in this space yet but my sense is this is one domain where his intuitionism has gone awry. Intuitionism seems a pretty sensible starting point to me in general... but in this case I suspect Mike's sense that there is a "soul" (some powerful non-physical essence of self and consciousness?) is so strong that it's bust through the powerful evidence that it's very unlikely to be true. In Bayesian terms his intuitive prior is overwhelmingly strong and he's not updated sufficiently with the evidence (IMHO). Many panpsychists understandably get annoyed when people call their views "spooky" or "mystical" or "magic" or "pseudo-religious" - but this does seem to be one case where beliefs in non-physical consciousness as an actual phenomena has led someone that way. I find that strange, given that Mike very robustly challenges those who think, driven by similarly powerful intuitions, that it "seems" that there is a god. Believing in the reality of abstract concepts like numbers (Platonically or as a form of descriptive pattern) doesn't seem to present that risk. But believing consciousness is non-physical sometimes seems to. He's an interesting case, in that I think he's a methodological naturalist (uses evidence and reason to ground his beliefs and to check his intuitions) but has come to believe in something I'd call decidedly supernatural. An eternal soul. I apologise for commenting before having actually read his papers on this stuff and I reserve the right to completely change my views when (and if) I know what I'm talking about 🙂
If I say that it is raining, then I think that it is safe to say that I mean that the statement "it is raining" is true. However, if I say that boiled potatoes taste good, then I am probably just meaning that I like the taste of boiled potatoes. I have known people (my eldest son when he was a child) who do not like taste of boiled potatoes. Whether or not boiled potatoes taste good is not an objective fact. Slowly killing an animal for pleasure is not normally something that I do. However, my young cat seems quite alright with having fun by slowly killing a mouse. Dead mice scattered about my yard are becoming increasingly common as my cat's hunting prowess develops. To a hungry polar bear, a human being is just food. We are a package of flesh that will serve as a nice meal. The notion that humans are somehow more than that is something that humans like to think. I think that. However, outside of my human community, I really do not think the rest of universe gives a fuck what we think. I remain unconvinced that a statement like "torturing babies for fun is wrong" is basically the same as "heat will not flow from a low temperature reservoir to a high temperature reservoir without work being done."
You don't need to understand redness or greenness in order to understand the relationship (difference) between red and green. As long as you can tell red stuff from green stuff, your perception of each is irrelevant. Likewise, you might intellectually recognize relationships between moral entities (claims, values, etc.) in useful ways, in ways having some intersubjective potential, without understanding the foundation of each moral entity. Your perception of the latter is analogously irrelevant. It's not obvious how the intelligibility of the relationships would entail anything about the intelligibility of the entities.
I'm only part way through Emerson but I feel urged to clear up some things if you are indeed interested in understanding others' views and not simply mocking them. Firstly, one can make a statement about something without saying it is a fact. It's simply an opinion. ie 'killing jews is wrong' is not necessarily a claim of fact, someone may just be expressing an opinion. I would think that's pretty easy to understand. Secondly, one can behave morally without believing morals are objective. ie one can form the opinion that it is wrong for them steal without believing everyone must share that opinion. Also I have a question, if you believe morality is objective does that mean there is a definite right or wrong answer to every moral question? So therefore everyone should have the exact same set of moral beliefs? If not, how do we decide who is right when there is a dispute, when people have differing intuitions?
So I just watched the bit about moral disagreement. You likened objective morality to other facts in the world that we don't always know and gave the example of who shot JFK. So you're implying there is a definite right answer to every moral question but we don't always know what it is. Given that our only access to these right answers is intuition, and obviously our intuition is often wrong given that we regularly disagree, it seems that leaves us with a supposedly objective fact that we can never possibly know. Huemer then likened it to disagreements about descriptive statements. I would think there is a clear difference as many descriptive statements can be proven to be true or false. Hence why we can do amazing things with engineering as there are many things in the world that can be measured in a multitude of ways in which there can be no disagreement. These I would think are objective facts. I'd love to hear an example of a descriptive disagreement that we can't resolve but is not subjective. Even concepts like mathematics can be proven so there can be no disagreement. I'm yet to hear anything close to proof of morality other than it just kinda feels right. Bit like the sun going around the earth or the years feeling shorter as I get older.
Well I made it to the end and when he said he believes souls have had infinite lifetimes that showed the type of thinking he uses. You discussed how some morals could have come about through evolution but to me it's pretty clear that's where all morality has come from. There's clear survival advantage when you are a communal species to acting morally. It doesn't mean there is a moral truth that you are perceiving, you are simply acting in a way that strengthens your place in the group. Over time the feelings that compel us to do that have become embedded, hence we feel like morality is a real thing in the world when actually it is just something that exists within our brain like other emotions and instincts. As for the comparison to math, well math and logic for that matter can proven, clearly morality cannot. Everyone agreeing about something makes it neither objective nor true.
You keep saying incomplete sentences like "it's wrong to kill babies..." and "the holocaust is wrong...". You need to finish the sentences with because *insert your moral reasoning*. I'm of course a subjectivist of some kind, but even if I wasn't, the ".. Because" part is still needed for objective morality. It could be "because God says so" or "because pain is to he avoided" but there is no such thing that is wrong in all scenarios. There will always be a hypothetical situation that flips right and wrong. Holocaust could be right if it is zombies we kill. Killing Hitler as a baby is already considered right by some people. Even the "there is no wrong or right" statement needs "because..." Some would say it's the is/ought I'm describing here and they would right.
@Corporate Overlord Well, I guess you can rephrase an hypothetical imperative to an categorical imperative unless z,x or y. but categorical imperatives don't exist, they are just hypothetical imperatives that we "feel" are universal. And since science don't go by feelings and hunches, I think this is just an arbitrary line. Arbitrary lines in morality is equal to subjective morality ergo no categorical imperatives exists. Remember that all the talk about categorical imperatives and deontological rules only apply in our western civilized world. Imagine a post apocalyptic world like the game fallout? or the world when the climate catastrophe really takes hold. then those rules will no longer apply. It will be as it always have been, the rules of evolution - those that survive to produce "strong" offspring will be right. Yes you could say, that our world is the most "natural" state of a civilization and therefore universal morality has its base here, but that would be factually wrong and an arbitrary standard.
@Corporate Overlord I don't see what meta-logic would bring to this discussion other than perhaps a modus ponens that concludes objective morality, but please point me in the right direction if you think, that there is some knowledge I'm missing. Your "I don't feel 2+2=4" is not an argument for objective morality, rather it's an argument for subjective morality. 2+2=4 is based on axioms made by humans, just like killing is wrong is based on axioms made by humans (and perhaps all social animals, but that remains to be proven). There may be an objective morality out there, but I'm not convinced. Nothing points in that direction. Is it wrong to kill a virus? is it wrong for a virus to kill? Why do we kill animals worse than we did humans in WW2? and that is just killing... The 1 thing that we should all agree upon and even there, we don't. We set arbitrary borders for everything and the only rule that seems to hold true in the universe all the time, is natural selection. Give me 1 good argument for why there should be an objective morality. I believe your perception of this topic is boxed in like Foucault predicts. Our thoughts are boxed in by the time we live in an are only expanded when great catastrophes happen. The argument for Categorical Imperatives is not compelling. That you should act in accordance to what rules you yourself would like to live under is an axiom in itself. I presupposes that you want to live in a group. But it says nothing about which group, how big it should be and for what purpose. Yes, it is good advise for us humans living in great social clumps, but it is not compelling for say, Muslims that want the whole world to be like them (or the christians crusades). Then killing infidels in the name of Allah is not only right, it's a free ticket to heaven. Breading more children than everybody else is also a way to "win" in a democratic world. Making abortions illegal is a way to achieve this. You would not want your enemies to go by the same rules. You may still find my epistemology lacking, but I assure you, that this is not a subject I take lightly and I have spend half of my life thinking about morality and how we as humans evolve our morality. And just to be clear, the claim that morality is subjective does under no circumstances rule out, that every single person on this world could agree on a feeling that killing is wrong. we could also all agree that blue is the best color to paint ceilings, but that in it self does not make it an objective universal rule.
@@darkensdiablosyes, individual atomic moral claims cannot be strung together into a coherent system. In your example, one needs to decide what is 'wronger': genocide or lilling babies? Utilitarians tried to do that by reducing moral value to the single measurement of utility. Unfortunately, coming up with an 'objective' cpncept of utility, let alone calculating such, is impracticable if not straight-out impossible.
How could one tell the difference between a genuinely objective moral truth and morality just being a societally conditioned phenonemon or as something that's encoded into us thru our genes by nature to help us survive? (Which wouldn't it make it objective just because it's natural, that would be the naturalistic fallacy)
Yeah the problem with theistic personalism--what Craig subscribes to--is that it ultimately does result in arbitrary morals and ultimately an existential brute fact. Craig says God is a necessarily existing being but, um, why? How? It still is unintelligible, and the necessary being we call God, on Craig's view, still seems ontologically groundless, with no reason why it happens to be this specific kind fo necessary being.
Yes. It's very strange. I don't think there is any more reason to think there are "moral properties" than I am inclined to think ghosts are real. Even if realists are justified in being realist because they have private access to moral facts, I don't have access to them, so why should I believe in them? Huemer and other moral realists seem to want to make these burden-shifting moves, but they do so in a way that seems to elevate their own personal intuitions to some kind of special epistemic status. I don't think there is any better reason to think moral realism is plausible than I do to think Bigfoot exists. Imagine if people who believed in Bigfoot ran around insisting that because they saw Bigfoot, the rest of us are obligated to prove Bigfoot doesn't exist.
Huemer is really, really good at explaining and clarifying concepts. But he is wrong about morality, which is clearly derivable from facts. Intuition is one way to access some knowledge, but you have to remember: our moral intuitions evolved because there are objective moral truths; they are not necessarily true simply because they evolved. You have to get the relationship right. Indeed, many of the moral intuitions that were correct in small hunter-gatherer groups are not adapted to the modern post-industrial environment (although any others still are adaptive).
Here is the thing. If you’re a atheist I can’t see how you can believe in objective morality. Because if that’s the case who or what determines morality ?
@@EmersonGreen yes! So again if there is no God or higher power. How can one claim objective morality ? Because there would have to be a rule giver ! Something or someone to be behind humans for it to be so. So let’s try and answer. What determines it? Meaning atheist can only make sense of subjective morality
@@EmersonGreen again, so let’s try this again. Do you believe in objective immoral acts ? If so HOW! I watched it you never can give a source. This is the issue. You can claim objective truths to immoral acts but you can’t give a source. Is it God, higher power, spirits, what is it? Now it’s logically sound to claim god or a higher power if there is moral objectivity. You can explain your views but you can also say what or who determine morality. Example is burning children alive something that is objectively wrong if so who creates this moral position? It’s beyond human opinion right… it’s something above humans ?
Am I thinking like an undergrad? I see 3 ways “baby torture for fun is wrong” can be true. Moral realism, based on evidence of intuitions (anything else?). subjectivism (of a kind?), where it expresses the speaker's personal commitment (or perhaps a culture's commitment) to a standard that clearly marks baby torture as bad. The standard could be objective, with only the commitment qualifying as subjective or intersubjective. Or it could be the econclusion of an argument that claims something like “as societies evolve/progress, some behaviors emerge as incompatible in some way with intelligent social interaction, and recreational baby torture is one of these. It does not violate the is-ought gap for persons/societies to be forced to choose at most one or two incompatible behaviors. So if social interaction is preferred, baby torture must be abandoned.” We might even be able to find some evidence. That is an odd way to unpack the sentence, but they all have problems. This would not tie down very many moral claims, just those that would directly contradict some central quality of the persons or society. Some might object that these qualities are not so central, or that the incompatibility is exaggerated. It does seem that evidence could exist, though it might be very difficult (and unethical?) to bring it into existence experimentally, as opposed to having historians argue over it. That last one is an odd hybrid between objective and subjective. It seems likely to leave most moral questions unanswered, but to exclude some things out of practical impossibility.
I think there is also a stigma against "scientism" for the reasons you are saying. Because it isn't really talking about, what is the essence of this scientism view? There is no appreciation for why people are drawn to this position. If we have to go on seemings at some level. Then it begs the question if this scientifically minded way of perceiving the world, is totally valid. Because you aren't necessarily creating an objection to that perception of seeing things that way. You are just saying it is vague and problematic. But maybe the essence of it is "man I can predict some interesting specific things about the future, so I prefer to only beleive things I can demonstrate by that metric" I mean so what if this is just something like a silhouette of reality? If somone prefers to value things in the descriptive terms of what they are aware of and what's been demonstrated to them, so what if they lose some of the appreciation for abstracts? So what if their source of meaning seems to he stuck in the cultural meaning that has been defined onto them in time? But that is the ironic thing about this scientism view. Despite its fixation on the future, it's tension seems to keep you thinking on today's terms. But maybe that's where the anxiety rests too. This tension about being wrong about beleifs. Which ironically causes you to lose the meaning of morality.
The Five Metaethical Positions:
- Noncognitivism/expressivism: Moral statements are neither true nor false. Evaluative predicates do not even purportedly refer to any sort of property, nor do evaluative statements assert propositions.
- Error theory/nihilism: Moral statements (that imply that something has an evaluative property) are all false.
- Subjectivism: Some moral statements are true, but not objectively. For a thing to be good is for some individual or group to (be disposed to) take some attitude towards it.
- Moral Naturalism: There are objective moral properties, but they are reducible. Evaluative truths are reducible to descriptive truths. Additionally, moral statements can be justified empirically.
- Moral Non-Naturalism/Intuitionism: There are objective moral properties, and they are irreducible. Evaluative truths are not reducible to descriptive truths. Additionally, at least some moral truths are known intuitively.
Why are these the only five broad options? Take a moral statement, like "Torturing an infant for fun is wrong." This is either (1) neither true nor false, (2) false, or (3) true. If you think it's true, the next question is whether the statement's truth depends on the attitudes of observers. If so, you're a subjectivist. If not, you're a moral realist: you believe in objective morality. Whether you think moral truths are reducible to descriptive truths is what decides whether you're a moral naturalist or non-naturalist; but either way, you're a moral realist.
These are not the only metaethical positions you can take. A quietist could hold that the question of whether there are stance-independent moral facts is conceptually confused, and that an accurate understanding of our concepts and language would lead to the recognition that the question wasn't a meaningful one in the first place. This would result in rejecting moral realism without endorsing any of the traditional three forms of antirealism.
The restrictive set of options you present here only make sense in the context of mainstream analytic philosophy. But there are philosophical traditions that fall outside the scope of analytic philosophy, but are within it yet are critical of certain presuppositions that philosophers tend to make, that would reject this framework, e.g., pragmatism, and views that draw on e.g., Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy, and quietistic approaches. I am a proponent of these approaches, which take a different metaphilosophical approach to philosophy, and don't generally fall within the framework Huemer outlines.
For instance, in my case, I do not believe there are stance-independent moral facts *and* I reject error theory, subjectivism, and noncognitivism. As such, I am a living example that the claim that these are the only antirealist positions is not true.
I mean no disrespect, but I am not sure why you are so insistent on this. Simply because Huemer makes this claim, doesn't mean his claim is correct. Huemer isn't the final authority on which positions are available to antirealists. Don Loeb provides an alternative that doesn't fit the traditional three categories, as does Gill. Both are distinguished philosophers who are no less authoritative than Huemer. So it's not clear why Huemer's word on this matter should be taken at face value. Whether or not there are only three forms of antirealism is a contested philosophical claim.
What about pyrrhonian moral skepticism?
@@ReverendDr.Thomas I believe it is the psychological attitude that justification for or against any moral belief seems either untenable or irrational. So it is skepticism towards moral knowledge itself.
@@ReverendDr.Thomas I didnt coin anything buddy lol clearly you aren't familiar with the philosophical literature. Refer to SEP entry on anti-realism which explicitly states one could be both a moral skeptic and moral realist. It simply has to do with justification and moral antirealism contains no epistemological clause.
Pyrrhonian moral skepticism avoids the dogmatic belief that there are or aren't any moral facts. They are agnostic on the proposition that all moral claims are false, whilst denying that we have justification to believe in any moral claims. This could be due to the problem of the criterion or other skeptical scenarios. So it has to do with our epistemic access to moral facts if they exist.
@@ReverendDr.Thomas This is my take on morality, it's similar to yours:
Morality is our attempt to categorize our actions as "right" or "wrong" respective to some goal (God's will, human health and happiness, etc). In this sense, it doesn't matter if a religion is true or not, the fact human beings choose which moral systems to care about or try to follow (or can be compelled/raised to believe one) means necessarily that the statement "morality is objective" is rendered practically meaningless. Morality is a belief/perspective, it's not a property like color: I can't have been raised seeing the sky as green but then choose to see it as blue later, but I could be raised to believe gay marriage is "wrong" because my religion says so and then choose to believe it's "right" later because I think it makes more sense to use human health and freedom as the basis of my moral system (and have a religious worldview that more accurately reflects this).
Aren't our moral systems arbitrary then? Not entirely, because human beings overwhelmingly care about the same things: human well-being; that is, the health and happiness of themselves and others and their freedom to experience love, beauty, and truth. Are those things objective or subjective? They're a mix of both, and they aren't rigidly defined which is why moral disagreement exists. Like all moral systems, choosing to participate in this moral system would still ultimately be up to you (though, people are so strongly inclined towards this kind of moral system that it borders on not being a choice). What compels people to modify their actions/make sacrifices for this moral system? The moral system centers around what they value; people are willing to make great sacrifices for the well-being of others and themselves, and that's an example of them participating in this moral system (risking my life to save somebody, eating food you don't like to stay healthy, etc).
So was the holocaust wrong? Yes, it needlessly and cruelly hurt and killed lots of people, so if you care about human well-being then it was awful. But how do you convince a Nazi that it's wrong, can't they REALLY believe in a moral system that says genocide is good? Sure, they could, and no matter how objective you think morality is, the Nazi COULD ALWAYS do that and you would have no basis to tell them they're wrong (saying "my morality is objective and it says you're wrong" wont change anything) other than to point out that their moral system is based on misrepresentations of reality (Nazi lies, propaganda) and is logically inconsistent, which both the moral objectivist and somebody like me would have to do.
I think my understanding of morality accounts for moral differences/confusions, the ways people talk and think about morality, the way we experience morality, our ultimate desire to adhere to moral systems, and the ways we can develop those systems. But I don't think it's a realist perspective.
Agnostic on meta ethics here, so such discussions are wonderful
35:16 On the critique against subjectivism.
If you had other values should you conform to those.
It's unclear which you the second "you" is referring to. Hypothetical me or actual me.
Actual me disagrees with hypothetical me per the hypothetical. So it's important.
I think realist sneak in objectivism here. It's like "would it be objectively correct to do this if you held such and such values" but that's not the subjectivists claim
Wow, Huemer has been doing a lot of these discussions lately. Credit to Huemer for taking the time to do so. Since I disagree with almost everything Huemer says about moral realism, I'll have to give this a listen and come back with what will almost certainly be many criticisms.
I will answer your comments a little bit later in Joe's Channel(Majesty of Reason), I found interesting that you didn't understood what an intuition and/or seeming is, Huemer just clarified that during the Debate, but ok... I will come back here too probably to criticize your comments as well.
But I agree that maybe Huemer isn't familiarized with some of the the positions that you mentioned there in another comment.
@@DavidRibeiro1 When you say " I found interesting that you didn't understood what an intuition and/or seeming is,"
What do you mean? What are you basing this claim off of?
Got those criticisms?
@@DavidRibeiro1 te amo david lindo
When listening to your discussion of "intuition, I am drawn to the book "the hidden spring" (solms).
In summary the foundation of consciousness is a region of the midbrain, which drives our cognition to action by 7 feelings; (poorly summarized here as); fear, grief/separation, frustration, lust, caring, play and seeking.
Evolution has adapted our cortex to "listen" to external senses, internal senses and the 7 affects to maintain homeostatic balance.
That people universally "feel opposed" to a child in pain or threat, is unsurprising.
A few years ago if you had asked if I would put on watchlist a video talking about moral realism...I would have said what's moral realism?...but times change and am really interested in this topic. Still shaping my view, currently an anti-moralism person, but persuaded by many moral realism arguments. Thanks for the content.
It's telling that even when you acknowledge that you're straw-manning the anti-realist view, you don't stop doing it. Undermines the point of the video (or at least the question mark in the title).
Speaking subjectively, I really enjoyed this video, I found it to be a great discussion on a topic it’s easy to get lost on.
Moral subjectivism seems to be the easier to believe but less exciting option, I mean no one need become defensive if I say I believe such and such is wrong for some reason that makes sense to me, if I maintain it’s just my personal opinion and need not be anybody else’s.
Moral realism on the other hand is more challenging, if I take the stance I believe such and such is morally wrong and that my view is in line with an objective fact, I’m putting myself in a higher moral position than anybody who does not believe such and such is morally wrong.
Objectively speaking, Emerson and Dr Huemer present a very good discussion that is of great intellectual worth. But I can’t be sure that is objectively true, and not just an extrapolation of my own subjective views.
Anyway, philosophy? Why not.
A very good and insightful discussion. Also good arguments. And I say that as someone who is probably oppossed to most (or at least a good chunk) of your views.
Have you ever had David Bentley Hart on? He has a decent grasp on a classical theistic view of reality without committing too hard in any particular direction. He's no Thomist. You might also like talking to him about Christian universalism.
Great conversation! Thank you for sharing it.
Related to the morality and God problem you were talking about, I tend to think the better solution is divine conceptualism + divine simplicity, so as a theist you have no problem rejecting nominalism and moral anti-realism. (Of course, these positions have other difficulties.)
BTW, this is the traditional position which Craig's reject
@@Napoleonheir1805 Yes, I know. What was your point?
Emerson, this is my take on morality. You can tell me if I'm crazy because I don't think it's realism but I don't see much of an objection to it in this video:
Morality is our attempt to categorize our actions as "right" or "wrong" respective to some goal (God's will, human health and happiness, etc). In this sense, it doesn't matter if you're religious or not, the fact human beings choose which moral systems to care about or try to follow (or can be compelled/raised to believe one) means necessarily that the statement "morality is objective" is rendered practically meaningless.
Morality is a belief/perspective, it's not a property like color: I can't have been raised seeing the sky as green but then choose to see it as blue later, but I could be raised to believe gay marriage is "wrong" because God forbids it and then choose to believe it's "right" later because I think it makes more sense to use human health and freedom as the basis of my moral system.
Aren't our moral systems arbitrary then? Not entirely, because human beings overwhelmingly care about the same things: human well-being; that is, the health and happiness of themselves and others and their freedom to experience love, beauty, and truth. Are those things objective or subjective? They're a mix of both, and they aren't rigidly defined which is why moral disagreement exists. Like all moral systems, choosing to participate in this moral system would still ultimately be up to you (though, people are so strongly inclined towards this kind of moral system that it borders on not being a choice). What compels people to modify their actions/make sacrifices for this moral system? The moral system centers around what they value; people are willing to make great sacrifices for the well-being of others and themselves, and that's an example of them participating in this moral system (risking my life to save somebody, eating food you don't like to stay healthy, etc).
So was the holocaust wrong? Yes, it needlessly and cruelly hurt and killed lots of people, so if you care about human well-being then it was awful. But how do you convince a Nazi that it's wrong, can't they REALLY believe in a moral system that says genocide is good? Sure, they could, and no matter how objective you think morality is, the Nazi COULD ALWAYS do that and you would have no basis to tell them they're wrong (saying "my morality is objective and it says you're wrong" wont change anything) other than to point out that their moral system is based on misrepresentations of reality (Nazi lies, propaganda) and is logically inconsistent, which both the moral objectivist and somebody like me would have to do.
I think my understanding of morality accounts for moral differences/confusions, the ways people talk and think about morality, the way we experience morality, our ultimate desire to adhere to moral systems, and the ways we can develop those systems. But I don't think it's a realist perspective.
The section on theism was particularly interesting. I'd like to hear more about the theism/anti-realism issue. I'm often confused when theists say that without God, objective morality doesn't exist, when their theory also rests on moral relativism. Furthermore, God commands all kinds of moral absurdities (e.g. Abraham being instructed to kill his son Issac) and we're supposed to think they aren't absurd because God said so. But why think that God couldn't command you to do something immoral? Kierkegaard was honest enough to accept this possibility.
Also, adding heaven and hell into the equation doesn't alter the theists' anti-realist position since one could subjectively want to avoid hell and desire to go into heaven. So if God commanded me to do X and avoid Y then, on anti-realism, I'd follow his orders for completely non-moral reasons such as subjectively wanting to please Him. I think Huemer was right in saying that just because God is an interesting, powerful and exceptional commander, doesn't mean that he's right. The government is an interesting, powerful and exceptional commander, not everything they say is right, either.
@Corporate Overlord Thanks for the reply.
I agree with what you've said. I just wanted to point out that, on theism, objective morality depends on God's commands and I worry that this makes them relative (for the theist).
I pretty much agree that some things are brute facts and ontologically basic. It's hard to prove what these ontologically brute facts are in the moral case, but one decent candidate seems to be 'It is wrong to hurt innocent people for fun.' Hard to see how that could be wrong.
On the issue about the government, I was just making a comparison. It seems that morality has to be something more than what some commanding force tells me to do (God, government, peers etc). Craig objects to this, he says that it is not God's commands which make something moral, but God's nature. The problem I have with this is that the bible has too many instances of God doing awful crap. Am I now supposed to believe that the awful things he does are suddenly right because theists tell me so? And why should I think that?
There are a lot of different ways to measure the morality of any given situation... the tricky part is determining which ones to apply.... it's basically like comparing apples and oranges... if I apply the "rulers" to measure a specific situation... let's say, the trolley problem.. there are several different moral dimensions at play: in-action/guilt/compassion/utilitarianism. There is some kind of calculus that goes on in everyone's head when they decide what to do.
And... that's what judges do in courts of law. They apply a variety of rulers... to decide whether or not someone is guilty of something... and if they are guilty, how guilty are they.
Am a little slow catching up with this one, but great discussion Emerson! Really enjoyed it!
Philosophical arguments like the contingency argument do take us to omnipotence, the supreme unbounded necessary being of unlimited power grounding all reality …
Fantastic video!
DVT does not violate Euthyphro dilemma if his actions/ Commands are grounded is his perfect character - not arbitrary .
I am a nihilist and a nominalist. I don't think moral truths have anything to do with objective truth. I don't think that any meaning is objective. I am not playing along with the fiction that there are moral truths, but deny them when I'm alone with me. I'm not just playing word games either and I find it rather irrational to say, that things are what they appear to be and that we should start from there, instead of asking for the burden of proof. There are countless examples, even in everyday life, that things are not what they appear to be. I don't just start from there.
Why do I still act, as if moral truths exist? Because I'm not gonna impose my wordlview on others. Their subjective experiences, their explanations about the world and their decisions are based on real reasons. Whether they have a reasonable justification is not on me to evaluate. But it isn't on the universe either. Acting in accordance with some kind of morality, serves a purpose. Being moral is pragmatically justified. And even if there is no epistemic justification available, I have a reason to behave morally good. Religion is like that too. Religion serves hope, meaning and purpose and is therefore pragmatically justified. The difference is, that I don't go that step further and call it true on top of that, when I'm incapable to justify such a claim on epistemic grounds. It's useful and that's it. Battery acid on anybody's face is not useful for anybody's face. This is universal, but it is subjective nonetheless. Is this a problem? No. I don't mind whether morals are actually real or objective. They are useful.
It's more along the lines of word games, to render pragmatic justifications truth. Religions do that. So, to me it seems more like ideology to claim, that moral realism is somehow coherent, than to say, that not believing in a claim because it cannot be demonstrated to be true being rendered as ideology. It appears to me like that, therefore, I start from there and call it fundamental, is not a valid pathway. These are appeals to intuition.
Aren't we capable, and don't we have actual examples, of changing our minds about any given "objective" truth? If so, then in what makes us think that "objectivity" is something we can identify in the first place? How would we know it when we have it and when we don't? "Objectivity" is an incoherent idea, in both ethics and epistemology. We are convinced of what we are for the reasons we find justified.
Hey Emerson, just come across your channel and subscribed. I am curious to hear you both expressing (acceptable levels of) ridicule of the position I currently hold (nihilism). What are the best technical works on realism that you can suggest, papers and books if you have any thoughts. Obviously I will need to tackle Huemer!
Looking forward to this! I'm so lucky to have interviewed both of you for @Sentientism, of course. Here's my conversation with Mike in case of interest: th-cam.com/video/O6lNEdVcohY/w-d-xo.html
Great video! Really enjoyed it :)
I think defining subjective in terms of what is contingent upon an attitude has certain issues.
Let's say that I am blind. The claim "there are no colors" would not be contingent upon my attitude, but could we say that it's a subjective claim? Or someone who has daltonism who is claiming the world is black and white, something which is not contingent upon their attitude(they may hate or love that form of perception), would be making an objective claim? Hardly.
I think morality doesn't exist an any "absolute" or objective sense. In fact, such a statement is as nonsensical to me as saying, "Absolute democracy exists." Or, "Objective baseball exists." It seems to me that these are all inventions of conscious minds. Were all minds to disappear from the universe, then so too would baseball, democracy, morality, etc. These things require minds to exist in any meaningful way.
I'm a Social Contract moral theorist. For me, morality is created to allow for the Social Contract to exist. It allows us to develop working definitions of "good" and "bad" in a moral sense. I define Social Contract as the mutually enjoyed benefits of social living created by voluntary giving up or agreeing not to use certain freedoms. I believe morality requires more than one sentient mind interacting with each other to exist.
If the “wrongness” that we attach to immoral actions is NOT perceived or even known about, is it still objectively wrong? For example: is abortion wrong only when we know about it, or even when fetuses naturally abort. If no one is in the forest to hear (perceive) the tree fall, then does it make a sound?
If you’re a realist, then yes: Bad states of affairs are still bad without any moral agents there to judge them as such. It’s the same with any other objective thing (e.g. a rectangular object still has four sides even if no one observes it).
@@EmersonGreen I’m a little skeptical of comparing the “rectangleness” of an object and the “badness” of an action/inaction. Hume wrote on the math-moral analogy and suggested that there are no motivations driving ones beliefs about mathematics, nor are we in disagreement about rectangular objects (mathematics) the same way that we are about morality, nor does morality admit the same kind of proof as mathematics. 🤔 What are your thoughts?
@@kimmyswan Disagreement is irrelevant and proof does exist qua intuition and reflexive equilibrium
@@kimmyswan Disagreement is irrelevant and proof does exist qua intuition and reflexive equilibrium
@@JudeLind I’m not sure intuition and reflection constitute proof in the same way as a mathematical proof. Math is mind independent specifically because it is distinct (and sometimes even runs counter to) our intuitions.
"I conclude then, that though the differences between people's ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of
Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite. But one word before I end. I have met people
who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one
man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right
Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did - if we really thought that there were
people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their
neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There
is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there
is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he
did so because he believed there were no mice in the house." C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity 1:18:58
Abominable
Bit perplexed at the assumption no existential inertia isn't a common belief among theists - Aquinas certainly thought there was no such inertia.
1:56:15
Cuz Plato is wrong and Aristotle is right. Forms are in things (as the principle of actuality), and give things the intelligible structure and nature they have, which is then limited to a specific, imperfect being via matter (the principle of potency) and you come into contact with the forms through your intellect via abstraction.
At 15:45, Emerson claims that it seems like he perceives wrongness.
I am baffled by this. What would it mean to perceive "wrongness"? How could that even be something that someone perceives, and why would you be inclined to take such a possibility seriously?
Compare to your experience of eating food. When you eat something you like, do you think you are "perceiving tastiness" in it? I don't. I think that when we eat things, it triggers various psychological mechanisms in our brain, among these certain affective and experiential states; tastiness is a feature of (or just is one of) these mental states, not of the things we're eating. We're not perceiving tastiness out there in the world. Food doesn't have "tastiness." We just enjoy the taste of some foods, and those taste experiences are psychological states, not features of the things we're eating.
Just the same, why think you're seeing "wrongness" out there? Why not instead suspect that the "wrongness" you're "perceiving" is a feature of your own psychological states, and your own mind interacting with the world? It almost seems as though moral realists are engaged in a strange kind of projective illusion, where they have a psychological experience or inference of some kind, e.g., "that's bad" or a negative emotion or something, and then project these experiences or inferences onto the world, as though the things that are prompting them to think or feel these way themselves have the properties of badness or negativity, rather than the badness or negativity being a feature of their own psychological states.
What I mean is that some things (actions, states of affairs, etc.) seem wrong to me
@@EmersonGreen Gotcha. I hope expressing bafflement isn't an indication that I'm upset or anything. I study this topic *because* I find differences between people super interesting. So I'm very curious about what moral experiences are like for different people.
I can't fathom what it would be like to seem to perceive wrongness, and am really interested in what other people's moral phenomenology is like.
Huemer makes many of the same claims he made when he appeared a few days ago on Majesty of Reason’s channel to discuss this topic with Don Loeb. I already provided extensive commentary there on why Huemer is mistaken about most of the things that he says.
First, Huemer claims that the only possible antirealist positions are noncognitivism, error theory, and subjectivism.
This is not true. There are a variety of other positions antirealists can take:
(a) Antirealists can deny that whether there are stance-independent moral facts turns on semantic claims about the meaning of ordinary moral claims. Since all three forms of antirealism Huemer describes rely on semantic analyses, such antirealist claims wouldn’t fall into any of those categories. For instance, antirealists can endorse metaethical indeterminacy about folk semantics, arguing that there is no determinate fact about whether moral claims specifically fit with subjectivist, error theoretic, or noncognitivist analyses.
(b) Antirealists can deny that questions about whether moral facts are stance-independent or not are meaningful. This would yield a kind of metaethical quietism.
(d) Antirealists can maintain that moral facts are incoherent, in accordance with Loeb’s proposal moral incoherentism. This represents an alternative to Huemer’s categories. Indeed, Huemer just had a discussion with Loeb, who has written about incoherentism here:
Loeb, D. (2008). Moral incoherentism: How to pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2, pp. 355-386). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
I did not see any rebuttals or arguments from Huemer that would show that Loeb’s position is impossible. As such, it’s puzzling to me that Huemer continues to maintain that there are only three possible antirealist positions. This simply isn’t true.
For antirealists, moral claims that attribute a positive evaluative property are either: 1) neither true nor false, 2) false, 3) true, but not objectively. Those are the three options. Nothing you've said here undermines that.
@@EmersonGreen I don't agree. They can be indeterminate between these, and I've already made this point more than once.
@@lanceindependent Do you just mean a combination of these three in different contexts (i.e. some moral claims are just expressions of emotion, some are commands, some are subjectively true, some are false, etc.)? Because if not, I have no idea what that's supposed to mean
@@EmersonGreen This point didn't originate with me. Please have a look at this paper by Michael Gill:
Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234.
Gill argues that in addition to the traditional accounts available for our analysis of moral claims, one possibility is that there is no determinate fact of the matter about whether moral claims best fit a cognitivist or noncognitivist analysis, objectivism or subjectivism, and so on.
For comparison, there may be no fact of the matter about whether, when people say "it's going to rain," that they're communicating a claim that commits them to any particular account of quantum mechanics. It could be, as Gill observes, that answers to certain kinds of questions just aren't relevant to and don't figure into certain kinds of utterances.
The same could, in principle, be true for ordinary moral claims. It could be that there's just no fact of the matter about whether such claims function to refer to stance-dependent or stance-independent facts.
Second, as I've pointed out, one's antirealist position does not require that you have a position on what ordinary people mean when they make moral claims.
Third, take the statement you provide here:
"moral claims that attribute a positive evaluative property are either: "
There are still more possibilities for an antieralist.
(1) It's possible that there is no distinctive category of "moral claims," such that one could provide any kind of answer as to whether moral claims do or don't do any particular thing. That is, one can deny that the very notion of a "moral claim" is a category about which there can be determinate or coherent answers. This would be a kind of second-order quietism that rejects the presupposes implicit in the way Huemer frames the possibilities
(2) What about moral claims that *don't* attribute a positive evaluative property? What if there are moral claims that aren't attributing positive or negative evaluative properties at all? How would you categorize those?
@@EmersonGreen //Do you just mean a combination of these three in different contexts//
No. That would be metaethical pluralism.
//Because if not, I have no idea what that's supposed to mean//
Perhaps not, but that doesn't mean that I haven't already provided an example of an alternative to the three possibilities outlined by Huemer. I already provided an explanation of indeterminacy in one of my previous comments to you. You didn't respond to it, so maybe you didn't see it. I'd be happy to explain indeterminacy, but you could also check out Gill's paper on the topic:
Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234.
I also have a blog post that mentions indeterminacy and that specifically argues against Huemer's claim that there are only three forms of antirealism. It's called "comparing apples to error theory," and you can see it on my blog, Lance Independent. I don't think TH-cam will let me send links, but I'd be happy to send you a link. It's a short article, so it wouldn't take too much time to have a look.
The examples I provide in that article do not even exhaust the alternative possibilites to Huemer's list of three possibilities. At least part of the problem is that Huemer's framework only makes sense within the context of a specific view about the nature of meaning and language, a view I reject. Questions about whether there are "stance-independent moral facts," simply do not, on my view, turn on semantic analysis of moral claims.
Note in all three cases: noncognitivism, subjectivism, and error theory, the rejection of moral realism turns in part on empirical claims about what people mean when they make moral claims. But I don't think whether moral realism is true depends on what people mean when they make moral claims, so I don't think antirealism requires a commitment to any of these positions.
great to see long, in-depth discussions on such big and interesting ideas - however:
you don't seem to be making any sound arguments for your position. you only seem to be making error filled arguments against alternative positions.
for what it's worth - my 'intuition' tells me that human morality ('moral truth' even) is most definitely subjective
I'd love to see you have him on to discuss libertarianism. Something you guys disagree on more.
I'm surprised the fictionalist stance strikes you both as totally incongruous. There are many an example of using a not-totally true language that is nevertheless very useful in many contexts that is still approximately justified in using them... Ie, free will, intentional stance, Newtonian mechanics, many concepts in economics, to think of a few.
Not totally true is different than wholly false. And Newtonian mechanics is true in a certain domain. The analogy between fictionalism in moral talk and Newtonian mechanics breaks down because one has some truth (Newton) and the other doesn’t (moral discourse under fictionalism).
@@landon5105Talk is pragmatic: the speaker makes a certain impact upon the listener (and often upon themselves, in a self-reinforcing way). If moral talk 'works' in the intended way in upholding certain attitudes and behaviors, it's not 'wholly false' in the sense of being far off the mark (as Newtonian mechanics would be in describing high-energy phenomena) despite being always false in the sense that the claim to objectivity implicit in any moral claim is unwarranted (as Newtonian mechanics, in a non-empty universe, always offers merely an approximation, albeit a close one).
I look at morality (ethical evaluatives + directives) as metaphysically real as chairs or biological species. Such categories are made up (not real), but they contain objective content nonetheless. This is why I don't like the standard realist - anti-realist framing in metaethics. Morality's real in one sense, but then not in another.
In the example of kids lighting a cat on fire, Dr. Huemer is wrong. The dog, as an observer, definitely sees the action as wrong. If you doubt it, just run the experiment. Dogs perceive the emotional status of others; they have a brain and mirror neurons. Also, they can express moral outrage.
The dog will hear the screams of the cat and will try to stop the burning. The dog does not react to the noise; he reacts to the pain expressed in the screams.
39:00 This is kind of actually why I'm inclined towards anti-realism. After all, regardless of the existence of 'moral fact', I would still have emotion, desires, and preferences. I would still find the Nazis repulsive. Whether or not there are some 'objective moral facts' of the matter is kind of irrelevant. After all, if there are objectively moral facts on the matter, then you could be wrong about them. In that regard, if tomorrow someone proved objectively that the holocaust was actually morally good all else being the same, I would still find it repulsive and I would still act accordingly.
exactly what I thought.
I found much of their rationale full of false logic
@@haydenwalton2766 can you explain?
It seems that the theist has two options for the grounding of objective moral facts. Either, they are grounded in the divine will, or the divine nature. On the “nature” view T”the divine will is what constitutes obligation, the moral facts come from the divine nature.
Theists could reject both of those views and be a moral non-naturalist along with me. In fact, many do!
Emerson, you are correct. One of my favourite philosophers of religion was keith Yandell. He was both a platonist and a theist. I should have qualified what I said and added the caveat that the options I gave above are typically what theists are comfortable with. I tend to take the view that moral facts are grounded in God’s nature, a close runner up is platonism.
@@EmersonGreenScoffing at nonbelievers and strawmanning them, why doesn't this sound like anything new? You're way too quick to dismiss the analogy with theism.
You accuse anti-realists of always questioning the most plausible claim whenever this is a moral claim, but you always propose the most widespread dogmas (the prohibition on torturing children, etc.) as the moral claim in question, thinking, 'surely he won't dare to deny _that_ '. This unfairly puts the interlocutor at the risk of being quoted out of context (especially in non-philosophical settings) as not caring about grave crimes, and places onto them the additional burden of defending their condemnation of such crimes at the same time as their metaethical stance.
Secondly, these extreme examples are far from the kind of moral dilemmas that come up in the day to day of ordinary people. Moral systems aim to be all-encompassing and deliver verdicts about any and all courses of action (or clearly designate a non-moral domain). Should I tell someone I care about what I really think about their outfit? What should I do with a found wallet? All of food ethics? There's no clear right or wrong on many issues, let alone an explicit way to discern between moral and non-moral norms. You might get universal agreement on specific atomic claims, but the challenge is coming up with a practicable, _consistent_ system of morality with wide applicability. Not even Christians can provide such with definitive certainty. Everyone always ends up deferring to 'moral intuition', i.e. personal preference.
You also make an arbitrary distinction between biblical norms, which can be immediately dismissed as soon as one rejects the divine justifier, and others that, on the contrary, _really_ are objective. However, I venture that all normative claims ever made, even biblical ones (or especially biblical ones, which would be controversial unless imposed by authority), must have some grounding in utility (the utility of certain people at a certain time). Even if a moral claim is the product of (arational) evolution, this mere fact suggests that the claim was biologically useful in some way. In any case, behavioral change is no quick and easy task. To question any moral dogma and adjust one's subsequent behavior accordingly, it helps to be aware of its origin and justification.
Finally, present-day concerns might be grounds for upholding traditional norms even after rejecting divine justification. E.g. gay marriage: even if you don't believe it's wrong, it might still be harmful to you if the 'right to marriage' is extended. Married couples might get an advantageous tax treatment, so you as a bachelor or heterosexual spouse might get disadvantaged. One can argue, from a purely legalistic/human-rights perspective, that the ideal principle of equal treatment trumps these materialistic concerns. But it doesn't hurt to be aware of one's hierarchy of personal preferences. Ultimately, it's for the political (hopefully democratic) process to decide and 'universalize' any norm.
Loved this thanks Emerson,
I was surprised to hear at the end that Mike believes in eternal souls... although I should have had a hint when he mentioned, after my conversation with him @Sentientism th-cam.com/video/O6lNEdVcohY/w-d-xo.html, that we "didn't even get a chance to talk about my beliefs on reincarnation!" :). I haven't read his work in this space yet but my sense is this is one domain where his intuitionism has gone awry. Intuitionism seems a pretty sensible starting point to me in general... but in this case I suspect Mike's sense that there is a "soul" (some powerful non-physical essence of self and consciousness?) is so strong that it's bust through the powerful evidence that it's very unlikely to be true. In Bayesian terms his intuitive prior is overwhelmingly strong and he's not updated sufficiently with the evidence (IMHO).
Many panpsychists understandably get annoyed when people call their views "spooky" or "mystical" or "magic" or "pseudo-religious" - but this does seem to be one case where beliefs in non-physical consciousness as an actual phenomena has led someone that way. I find that strange, given that Mike very robustly challenges those who think, driven by similarly powerful intuitions, that it "seems" that there is a god. Believing in the reality of abstract concepts like numbers (Platonically or as a form of descriptive pattern) doesn't seem to present that risk. But believing consciousness is non-physical sometimes seems to.
He's an interesting case, in that I think he's a methodological naturalist (uses evidence and reason to ground his beliefs and to check his intuitions) but has come to believe in something I'd call decidedly supernatural. An eternal soul.
I apologise for commenting before having actually read his papers on this stuff and I reserve the right to completely change my views when (and if) I know what I'm talking about 🙂
You too look a bit similar; Huemer looks older and wiser though.
1:56:38 Good question
I've not heard of a single physicist or mathematician who doesn't believe in mathematic realism
If I say that it is raining, then I think that it is safe to say that I mean that the statement "it is raining" is true. However, if I say that boiled potatoes taste good, then I am probably just meaning that I like the taste of boiled potatoes. I have known people (my eldest son when he was a child) who do not like taste of boiled potatoes. Whether or not boiled potatoes taste good is not an objective fact.
Slowly killing an animal for pleasure is not normally something that I do. However, my young cat seems quite alright with having fun by slowly killing a mouse. Dead mice scattered about my yard are becoming increasingly common as my cat's hunting prowess develops.
To a hungry polar bear, a human being is just food. We are a package of flesh that will serve as a nice meal. The notion that humans are somehow more than that is something that humans like to think. I think that. However, outside of my human community, I really do not think the rest of universe gives a fuck what we think.
I remain unconvinced that a statement like "torturing babies for fun is wrong" is basically the same as "heat will not flow from a low temperature reservoir to a high temperature reservoir without work being done."
You don't need to understand redness or greenness in order to understand the relationship (difference) between red and green. As long as you can tell red stuff from green stuff, your perception of each is irrelevant. Likewise, you might intellectually recognize relationships between moral entities (claims, values, etc.) in useful ways, in ways having some intersubjective potential, without understanding the foundation of each moral entity. Your perception of the latter is analogously irrelevant. It's not obvious how the intelligibility of the relationships would entail anything about the intelligibility of the entities.
I'm only part way through Emerson but I feel urged to clear up some things if you are indeed interested in understanding others' views and not simply mocking them. Firstly, one can make a statement about something without saying it is a fact. It's simply an opinion. ie 'killing jews is wrong' is not necessarily a claim of fact, someone may just be expressing an opinion. I would think that's pretty easy to understand. Secondly, one can behave morally without believing morals are objective. ie one can form the opinion that it is wrong for them steal without believing everyone must share that opinion. Also I have a question, if you believe morality is objective does that mean there is a definite right or wrong answer to every moral question? So therefore everyone should have the exact same set of moral beliefs? If not, how do we decide who is right when there is a dispute, when people have differing intuitions?
So I just watched the bit about moral disagreement. You likened objective morality to other facts in the world that we don't always know and gave the example of who shot JFK. So you're implying there is a definite right answer to every moral question but we don't always know what it is. Given that our only access to these right answers is intuition, and obviously our intuition is often wrong given that we regularly disagree, it seems that leaves us with a supposedly objective fact that we can never possibly know. Huemer then likened it to disagreements about descriptive statements. I would think there is a clear difference as many descriptive statements can be proven to be true or false. Hence why we can do amazing things with engineering as there are many things in the world that can be measured in a multitude of ways in which there can be no disagreement. These I would think are objective facts. I'd love to hear an example of a descriptive disagreement that we can't resolve but is not subjective. Even concepts like mathematics can be proven so there can be no disagreement. I'm yet to hear anything close to proof of morality other than it just kinda feels right. Bit like the sun going around the earth or the years feeling shorter as I get older.
Well I made it to the end and when he said he believes souls have had infinite lifetimes that showed the type of thinking he uses. You discussed how some morals could have come about through evolution but to me it's pretty clear that's where all morality has come from. There's clear survival advantage when you are a communal species to acting morally. It doesn't mean there is a moral truth that you are perceiving, you are simply acting in a way that strengthens your place in the group. Over time the feelings that compel us to do that have become embedded, hence we feel like morality is a real thing in the world when actually it is just something that exists within our brain like other emotions and instincts. As for the comparison to math, well math and logic for that matter can proven, clearly morality cannot. Everyone agreeing about something makes it neither objective nor true.
You keep saying incomplete sentences like "it's wrong to kill babies..." and "the holocaust is wrong...".
You need to finish the sentences with because *insert your moral reasoning*.
I'm of course a subjectivist of some kind, but even if I wasn't, the ".. Because" part is still needed for objective morality.
It could be "because God says so" or "because pain is to he avoided" but there is no such thing that is wrong in all scenarios. There will always be a hypothetical situation that flips right and wrong.
Holocaust could be right if it is zombies we kill.
Killing Hitler as a baby is already considered right by some people.
Even the "there is no wrong or right" statement needs "because..."
Some would say it's the is/ought I'm describing here and they would right.
Looks like someone forgot to do the reading for Kant in their undergraduate ethics course
@@cmo5150 sure, I didn't read Kant.
What did he say? Please enlighten me.
@Corporate Overlord Well, I guess you can rephrase an hypothetical imperative to an categorical imperative unless z,x or y. but categorical imperatives don't exist, they are just hypothetical imperatives that we "feel" are universal.
And since science don't go by feelings and hunches, I think this is just an arbitrary line.
Arbitrary lines in morality is equal to subjective morality ergo no categorical imperatives exists.
Remember that all the talk about categorical imperatives and deontological rules only apply in our western civilized world. Imagine a post apocalyptic world like the game fallout? or the world when the climate catastrophe really takes hold. then those rules will no longer apply. It will be as it always have been, the rules of evolution - those that survive to produce "strong" offspring will be right.
Yes you could say, that our world is the most "natural" state of a civilization and therefore universal morality has its base here, but that would be factually wrong and an arbitrary standard.
@Corporate Overlord I don't see what meta-logic would bring to this discussion other than perhaps a modus ponens that concludes objective morality, but please point me in the right direction if you think, that there is some knowledge I'm missing.
Your "I don't feel 2+2=4" is not an argument for objective morality, rather it's an argument for subjective morality.
2+2=4 is based on axioms made by humans, just like killing is wrong is based on axioms made by humans (and perhaps all social animals, but that remains to be proven).
There may be an objective morality out there, but I'm not convinced. Nothing points in that direction.
Is it wrong to kill a virus? is it wrong for a virus to kill? Why do we kill animals worse than we did humans in WW2?
and that is just killing... The 1 thing that we should all agree upon and even there, we don't.
We set arbitrary borders for everything and the only rule that seems to hold true in the universe all the time, is natural selection.
Give me 1 good argument for why there should be an objective morality.
I believe your perception of this topic is boxed in like Foucault predicts. Our thoughts are boxed in by the time we live in an are only expanded when great catastrophes happen.
The argument for Categorical Imperatives is not compelling.
That you should act in accordance to what rules you yourself would like to live under is an axiom in itself. I presupposes that you want to live in a group. But it says nothing about which group, how big it should be and for what purpose.
Yes, it is good advise for us humans living in great social clumps, but it is not compelling for say, Muslims that want the whole world to be like them (or the christians crusades). Then killing infidels in the name of Allah is not only right, it's a free ticket to heaven. Breading more children than everybody else is also a way to "win" in a democratic world. Making abortions illegal is a way to achieve this. You would not want your enemies to go by the same rules.
You may still find my epistemology lacking, but I assure you, that this is not a subject I take lightly and I have spend half of my life thinking about morality and how we as humans evolve our morality.
And just to be clear, the claim that morality is subjective does under no circumstances rule out, that every single person on this world could agree on a feeling that killing is wrong. we could also all agree that blue is the best color to paint ceilings, but that in it self does not make it an objective universal rule.
@@darkensdiablosyes, individual atomic moral claims cannot be strung together into a coherent system. In your example, one needs to decide what is 'wronger': genocide or lilling babies? Utilitarians tried to do that by reducing moral value to the single measurement of utility. Unfortunately, coming up with an 'objective' cpncept of utility, let alone calculating such, is impracticable if not straight-out impossible.
How could one tell the difference between a genuinely objective moral truth and morality just being a societally conditioned phenonemon or as something that's encoded into us thru our genes by nature to help us survive? (Which wouldn't it make it objective just because it's natural, that would be the naturalistic fallacy)
Very good question
This emerson guy has obviously a lot of trouble understanding moral anti realism
1:53:58 Why would that be expected on evolution?
Huemer coming out with a new book or something? Why's he doing so many interviews
People wanna talk to him 🤷♂️
Yeah the problem with theistic personalism--what Craig subscribes to--is that it ultimately does result in arbitrary morals and ultimately an existential brute fact. Craig says God is a necessarily existing being but, um, why? How? It still is unintelligible, and the necessary being we call God, on Craig's view, still seems ontologically groundless, with no reason why it happens to be this specific kind fo necessary being.
52:00 This take on burden of proof seems a bit weird.
Yes. It's very strange. I don't think there is any more reason to think there are "moral properties" than I am inclined to think ghosts are real.
Even if realists are justified in being realist because they have private access to moral facts, I don't have access to them, so why should I believe in them?
Huemer and other moral realists seem to want to make these burden-shifting moves, but they do so in a way that seems to elevate their own personal intuitions to some kind of special epistemic status. I don't think there is any better reason to think moral realism is plausible than I do to think Bigfoot exists. Imagine if people who believed in Bigfoot ran around insisting that because they saw Bigfoot, the rest of us are obligated to prove Bigfoot doesn't exist.
Huemer is really, really good at explaining and clarifying concepts. But he is wrong about morality, which is clearly derivable from facts. Intuition is one way to access some knowledge, but you have to remember: our moral intuitions evolved because there are objective moral truths; they are not necessarily true simply because they evolved. You have to get the relationship right. Indeed, many of the moral intuitions that were correct in small hunter-gatherer groups are not adapted to the modern post-industrial environment (although any others still are adaptive).
Here is the thing. If you’re a atheist I can’t see how you can believe in objective morality. Because if that’s the case who or what determines morality ?
“How can you believe in objective morality? Who determines it?” dawg think about what you’re saying
@@EmersonGreen yes! So again if there is no God or higher power. How can one claim objective morality ? Because there would have to be a rule giver ! Something or someone to be behind humans for it to be so. So let’s try and answer. What determines it? Meaning atheist can only make sense of subjective morality
watch my video about the moral argument for god. your comments are incoherent. I explain my views at length in that video.
@@EmersonGreen again, so let’s try this again. Do you believe in objective immoral acts ? If so HOW! I watched it you never can give a source. This is the issue. You can claim objective truths to immoral acts but you can’t give a source. Is it God, higher power, spirits, what is it?
Now it’s logically sound to claim god or a higher power if there is moral objectivity. You can explain your views but you can also say what or who determine morality.
Example is burning children alive something that is objectively wrong if so who creates this moral position? It’s beyond human opinion right… it’s something above humans ?
Am I thinking like an undergrad?
I see 3 ways “baby torture for fun is wrong” can be true.
Moral realism, based on evidence of intuitions (anything else?).
subjectivism (of a kind?), where it expresses the speaker's personal commitment (or perhaps a culture's commitment) to a standard that clearly marks baby torture as bad. The standard could be objective, with only the commitment qualifying as subjective or intersubjective.
Or it could be the econclusion of an argument that claims something like “as societies evolve/progress, some behaviors emerge as incompatible in some way with intelligent social interaction, and recreational baby torture is one of these. It does not violate the is-ought gap for persons/societies to be forced to choose at most one or two incompatible behaviors. So if social interaction is preferred, baby torture must be abandoned.” We might even be able to find some evidence. That is an odd way to unpack the sentence, but they all have problems. This would not tie down very many moral claims, just those that would directly contradict some central quality of the persons or society. Some might object that these qualities are not so central, or that the incompatibility is exaggerated. It does seem that evidence could exist, though it might be very difficult (and unethical?) to bring it into existence experimentally, as opposed to having historians argue over it.
That last one is an odd hybrid between objective and subjective. It seems likely to leave most moral questions unanswered, but to exclude some things out of practical impossibility.
I think there is also a stigma against "scientism" for the reasons you are saying.
Because it isn't really talking about, what is the essence of this scientism view? There is no appreciation for why people are drawn to this position.
If we have to go on seemings at some level. Then it begs the question if this scientifically minded way of perceiving the world, is totally valid.
Because you aren't necessarily creating an objection to that perception of seeing things that way.
You are just saying it is vague and problematic.
But maybe the essence of it is "man I can predict some interesting specific things about the future, so I prefer to only beleive things I can demonstrate by that metric"
I mean so what if this is just something like a silhouette of reality?
If somone prefers to value things in the descriptive terms of what they are aware of and what's been demonstrated to them, so what if they lose some of the appreciation for abstracts? So what if their source of meaning seems to he stuck in the cultural meaning that has been defined onto them in time?
But that is the ironic thing about this scientism view. Despite its fixation on the future, it's tension seems to keep you thinking on today's terms.
But maybe that's where the anxiety rests too. This tension about being wrong about beleifs.
Which ironically causes you to lose the meaning of morality.