This was a great interview! Would absolutely love to see Alex O'Connor (CosmicSkeptic) on here to further discuss some of these topics related to animal ethics and veganism. Thank you both!
For sure. Alex really needs to drop his foolish commitment to the idea that every action is done to maximize "pleasure", leading him deep into No True Scotsman territory. Peter Singer politely tolerated Alex making absurd claims (e.g., that a soldier diving on a grenade for his brothers probably experiences such intense pleasure in that moment that it exceeds the future pleasures he sacrifices). Michael is a thinker who would absolutely set Alex straight on this point.
@@indef2def What's the problem with "maximize pleasure"? You can reframe it as maximize satisfaction if it helps but is the same thing (as satisfaction is reduced to feelings), and it is true. The soldier diving on a grenade reacts to the perceived unsatisfying feeling of not diving (meaning of not living a life of not fighting for what he loves in general). Thats why he does what he does. Even though it is not practicaly sound advise to tel someone persue pleasure as this is easily misinterpreted and conflated with egoistic persuing of spesific type pleasures, plilosophicaly and in an ultimate sense, only pleasure matters. What else meaningful even exist apart from consciousness?... Everything else is a meaningless conept. Everything has to be reduced to consciousness in order to gain meaning.
@@danedane4444 What you've outlined there is exactly what the No True Scotsman fallacy is. "Pleasure" has a pretty clear range of meanings in ordinary language, and the soldier diving on the grenade sure isn't it. It would be barely more reasonable to claim "everyone acts to maximize avocados", and then suppose that the soldier must have envisioned himself getting lots of avocados while diving on the grenade.
YES!! I’m so happy to see this. Thank you for your work Edit: I’m about 8 minutes in, and (though I really like Huemer) he is coming off as being pretty rude. I hope he’s okay
Yeah he’s coming off as a liberal college student who really hasn’t learned enough about evolution to have sophisticated views on things like morality. This a typical problem with people who are primarily activists. They want to change rather than understand. And the issue is they think their worldview is the obviously correct thing to change into. So much egocentric bias, sloppy language, and circular logic, and I’m only twenty minutes in. This is the first time I’m hearing of this guest so I don’t know who he is but it’s definitely hard to listen to. Ricardo clearly knows more about evolution than the guest but his questions are being answered, as I said, like a college kid with a opinionated world view. rather than a scientist. I say all this as an evolutionary science nerd and vegan of many years. I probably don’t disagree with his ethics but his explanation and understanding of such things seems juvenile thus far. Hopefully it gets better.
Obrigado pelo vídeo. Sobre a questão da eliminação das espécies carnívoras do topo da cadeia alimentar e do impacto nos ecossistemas, há uma série de vídeos muito interessantes no TH-cam sobre a importância dos lobos no parque de Yellowstone. (P.s. mas abandonar a chanfana é que não! Além do mais, sendo feita com carne de cabra já com uma certa idade, só é preciso esperar que morra naturalmente!😁)
I love Huemer I disagree with his abortion violinist thing tho because the violinist is attatched to whatever part of the body that is made to serve some purpose that’s not good but the fetus is in the uterus which is clearly solely for the growth of a fetus so women have a biological responsibility and are the only ones with that responsibility so I don’t know in terms of morality I guess knowing that the fetus won’t become a bicycle or a cell phone that it always becomes a human it’s at least obviously obstructing life maybe not outright murder so whatever you know it’s wrong.
"Where do those intuitions come from?" Fundamentally the human nervous system. Ethics inherently include emotions ( and we reason about ethics after the affect). For example, if humans were just brains with no emotive context ( e.g., just non-emotive information processing machines. e.g., like computers are), would we even be motivated to think about survival?. What would be the value of survival without the experience of pleasure or the hope of experiencing joy? Other than the physiological mechanism of pain avoidance ( which promotes survival). I don't think we can demarcate conscious experience and emotion. Therefore, we can't demarcate cognition and morality. For morality without emotion ( e.g., pain, pleasure, etc) is what? Can someone think of a reason to have a sense of right or wrong without a sense of pleasure and pain? What would morality be guidance for? Another way to think about morality is that it's specifically a social psychological phenomenon. Imagine you were born alone on an island that only consisted of mega-flora (non-microscopic plants, fungi). Due to the interface between human psychology and plants anatomy and physiology ( e.g., plants don't behave like conscious agents), it's likely that a person born alone on an island of plants would have no need for any sense of morality. In other words, there would be nothing to "hurt", nothing to demand it be treated as an equal. Morality is social psychology specific.
I'm surprised that Michael thinks funniness is a paradigmatic example of subjectivity, since some of his core arguments for moral realism (the arguments from the syntax and semantics of moral language) would seem to support realism with respect to (at least certain levels of) things like humor, personal beauty and aesthetic value. We don't use the same language about pizza topping preference -- unless we're joking -- as we would use for someone who claimed that Justin Bieber was a better songwriter than Bob Dylan, for example, or that one of Louis C.K.'s famous bits was less funny than "What's a ghost's favorite fruit? A boo-berry." There seem to be plenty of views about such features that are so stupid they'd incline me to say the person didn't really understand what the feature in question actually means, in pretty much the same way you and I would with moral claims.
2:57 - Is good dependent on the attitude of observes? Michael says: No. Torture babies is wrong. Even if they change their attitudes *it is still wrong*. But says who if no one says? This is clearly a judgement. 'Torturing babies is wrong' is not an independent fact such as gravitational constant, it depends on someone judging it. So, who makes the judgement that *torturing babies is wrong*? And who ever knows it or intuits it if there is no subjects to do so? God? 9:30 - The argument is whether all there is to *ethics and morality* is debating about ethics and drawing conclusions on soundness of each argument. Michael clearly says: No, because we can intuit ethical choices. Yet, philosophers involved in ethics all have intuitions, but arrive at different moral conclusions. How so if intuitions are right? How does that say about ethics? Which intuition is then absolutely right, objectively, independently of the speaker, and which answer right? Who decies on the issue in moral realism, God? Everyone knows-knows their intuition is true, but can anyone be sure-sure? Nope. I really can't see how one can solve moral realism this way.
>Michael says: No. Torture babies is wrong. Even if they change their attitudes *it is still wrong*. But says who if no one says? This is clearly a judgement. I guess the moral realist would say that something being a judgement does not preclude it from being true or false independent of the attitudes of observers. We make a judgement that the observable universe began in a Big Bang 13.7 bilion years ago based on the available evidence. But our judgement can be either factual or fail to correspond to reality. >'Torturing babies is wrong' is not an independent fact such as gravitational constant Well, the moral realist would say that it is a fact that is as independent as the gravitational constant. Although ethical intuitionists like Huemer would be more likely to compare ethics to something like mathematics that is known a priori and has no causal powers. >Yet, philosophers involved in ethics all have intuitions, but arrive at different moral conclusions. How so if intuitions are right? Well, it's an obvious strawman. Of course nobody thinks that our intuitions about anything, including ethics, are infallible. It's just that they have a tendency to lead us to the truth. The fact that we are not infallible does not mean that everything goes. You know, physicists judging the same evidence sometimes draw different conclusions as to what theory is the best explanation of the data. Some of our eminent physicists have different intuitions than others concerning whether the cosmos as a whole had a beginning or what is the best interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the latter case it may not be even in principle possible to solve the disagreement by gathering more data. Clearly all of these intuitions cannot be correct. But I don't see how it shows that we can never rely on intuition. There are many cases where physicists of course do agree that intuitively the theory is the best fit for the data. For example, physicists agree that the Earth is approximately a sphere and is not flat. You can make similar examples when comes to economics (economists agree that rent control causes housing shortages, but disagree what is the magnitude of impact of taxes on work effort), or indeed philosophy. Similarly, in ethics you can make up thought experiments where people have different intuitions and we are not able to resolve the disagreement. But there are many scenarios that strike almost all of us as clearly morally wrong and so we have good grounds for accepting that it is in fact the case. For example, we may disagree about whether abortion at a particular point in the pregnancy is equivalent to murder. Indeed, there is a lot of disagreement about this even in the two camps. For example, pro-choice people disagree what should be the cut-off for the age of the fetus for which abortion is permissible - 3 months, 5 months or maybe something else. But I don't see how the disagreement about abortion casts doubt on the fact that for example, Ted Bundy's murders were wrong. >Which intuition is then absolutely right, objectively, independently of the speaker, and which answer right? Well, if eminent physicists disagree then I guess we laypeople should withhold judgement. Similarly, if there is much disagreement about a particular sceanrio among ethicists then similarly we don't know what is in fact correct. >How does that say about ethics? That we are not infallible and intuitions can mislead us, just like in all other areas of life. >Who decies on the issue in moral realism, God? Who decides in external world realism which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct if physicists disagree? God? >Everyone knows-knows their intuition is true, but can anyone be sure-sure? Yeah, that's the problem with human beings that we are often too damn confident that we know the truth. But I don't see how this in anyway undermines moral realism, anymore than the disagreement about the intepretation of quantum mechanics undermines that there is indeed a fact of the matter who is right or who is wrong.
@@marcinteklinski3206 ">'Torturing babies is wrong' is not an independent fact such as gravitational constant Well, the moral realist would say that it is a fact that is as independent as the gravitational constant." He/she could say that, but not substantiate it. In fact, as an intuitionist, you are trapped in this tragic situation with no options. That 'Torturing babies is wrong' is neither obtainable nor it is falsifiable. Thus many people would deem it something akin to a vivid metaphysical speculation or pseudoscience at best, rather than speaking about facts. ">Yet, philosophers involved in ethics all have intuitions, but arrive at different moral conclusions. How so if intuitions are right? Well, it's an obvious strawman." Strawman against whom? I did not attribute this view to anyone in particular. This is just my argument coming from the observation of a tumultuous and fruitless endeavour that ethics has been in the 20th century until now. A spectacular farce that produced a gazillion conflicting stances. "Of course, nobody thinks that our intuitions about anything, including ethics, are infallible. It's just that they have a tendency to lead us to the truth. The fact that we are not infallible does not mean that everything goes. You know, physicists judging the same evidence sometimes draw different conclusions as to what theory is the best explanation of the data." This misses the mark. Physics and science are predominantly about what 'is' business, and not 'ought to be' business. They are not saying that it would be 'good' if there were no quarks. "Some of our eminent physicists have different intuitions than others concerning whether the cosmos as a whole had a beginning or what is the best interpretation of quantum mechanics." Interpretation of facts and forming hypotheses (along with predictions) is not analogous to the discourse about values. Firstly, if 'Good' is at all a natural property, then it cannot be predicted in the same way as orbital velocity, or the existence of Higgs Boson in the great hadron collider. Secondly, 'Good', and what it is, isn't the same as the event GW150914 that occurred in 2016. Thus, ethics is not subject to the deductive discourse which is characteristic of the modern scientific method. "But there are many scenarios that strike almost all of us as clearly morally wrong and so we have good grounds for accepting that it is in fact the case." Here again, you are making the point that logically says, 'some of us think X is wrong', but it's not the same as 'the sun did rise this morning'. The former is a non-universal proposition, it is contingent logically. The latter is the truth that cannot be otherwise. Atop of that, existentially (w/ quantifier), you will always find a logical counterexample to the claim that 'Ted Bundy's murder was wrong'. ">Who decies on the issue in moral realism, God? Who decides in external world realism which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct if physicists disagree? God?" Interpretations of quantum physics are predominantly the domain of philosophy of physics, not physics by itself as science. An enormous number of modern physicists (i.e. Richard Feynman) loathe such unfound metaphysical theorizing.
'Torturing babies is wrong' is not an independent fact such as gravitational constant, it depends on someone judging it. All knowledge including scientific knowledge relies on basic intuitions at its core. You can keep asking "why"... eventually you'll get to elementary assumptions that you simple accept to be true. (Munchaussen trilemma). Gravitational constant requires all the assumptions needed to make science and math possible. There are basic elementary logical mathematical intuitions... similarly there are basic moral intuitions. It is simply true that "pain and suffering in and of itself" is a bad thing. To me it's as clear as the law of noncontradiction. I can't prove the law of noncontradiction. I can't prove the pain principle. If someone denies the law of noncontradiction, then discourse is impossible. Same way if someone thinks torture of babies is ok, then discourse about morality is impossible. We start with some kind of framework of common intuitions. It's really pointless to debate why these base intuitions are true. All we can strive for is some kind of consistency. That's what I find wrong with the moral anti-realist. The inconsistency. They all make "should" statements. They're involved in politics... they argue against slavery and at the same time they say there's no fact of the matter that slavery is a bad thing. Makes no sense to me. Is it some kind of wordplay or deception they are engaged in?
If sentience is necessary condition of moral significance, then we might just breed animals and humans that are incapable of having pain and use them however we want or what?
Yeah but we’ll have sophisticated robots (including soft body robots for certain tasks) much much sooner. Also lab meat is already here. We don’t need insentient human slaves, nor insentient animal farms. And there would be also the danger of mistaking that they don’t have sentience-you can’t look at me and say what’s "inside" my mind, experience my experience, if I have any or I’m just a sophisticated intelligent piece of dead matter.
Michael Huemer is a supreme question begger. If you think harm could be good you're irrational and crazy... Why?... Well cause you disagree with Michael Huemer. See how that works? Huemer should revisit epistemology and relearn what the problem of the criteria is.
Extremely lazy interview. Didn't discuss pesticides and the large number of animals killed by them to produce fruit and vegetables. Didn't discuss the morality of pest control or conservation or pets. Not at all clear if his problem is with current farming practices and why not just work to improve them. Does he have an issue with free range farming?
However, your mentionning the problems many ecologists are aware of. And advocate agri-ecologcal farming methods that don't use pesticides. FYI, those pesticides also contamniate our foods ( via humans eating the animals that digest perticdes or pesticide residues on the plants we eat). There are better alternatives to reduce the amount of insects on agricultural plants. e.g., using the insects natural predators. Plant agri-mono-culture is also harmful to the environment. To quote "Does he have an issue with free range farming?" He answered that question. Becasue plants don't suffer death like animals do, the ethical approach is to replace all forms of animal meat with "meat alike" & / or cultivated meat products ( i.e., no killing animals, "free range" or not, for food"). I assume you don't want to kill animals just for the sake of killing, therefore, why wouldn't you prefer to eat meat ( cultivated), without an animal having to die to feed you? Though as Micheal Huemer mentioned, there will be those oddities that are amoral and therefore will just desire to kill animals, therefore, eventually we will need to make killing animals illegal ( in modern cultures killing animals isn't a neccasity, it's a cultural norm)
Using pesticides to protect food/property doesn't seem as bad as actively breeding animals to really bad life conditions (and sometimes also with selected traits that would make their life worse in itself, e.g the case of broiler chickens) and killing them for trivial reasons (tastes nice). Also, those circa 70 billions land animals we kill every year also need to eat something. Crops grown for animal feed use pesticdes too.
@@richardgamrat1944 "crops grown for animal food use pesticides too" Right! Also animals seem to be given vitamin B12 supplementation (as per an Earthling Ed video) going against another often invoked issue, namely that without meat we need to take "pills". And most soy production is destined to farmed animals, not human consumption, which contradicts another critique, that vegans lead to deforestation for soy cultivation. People who criticize veganism seem very sensible to all sorts of things-from deforestation, use of pesticides, to "harming vegetables", to depriving millions and billions of farmed animals from existing, etc-but they don’t seem to have any qualms about what happens in the filthy, overcrowded, disease ridden hellish places where our food animals live their lives. That’s a very peculiar mix of sensibility & ignorance, of outrage & complacency 🤷
Wow John Wick is talking about morals
This was a great interview! Would absolutely love to see Alex O'Connor (CosmicSkeptic) on here to further discuss some of these topics related to animal ethics and veganism. Thank you both!
For sure. Alex really needs to drop his foolish commitment to the idea that every action is done to maximize "pleasure", leading him deep into No True Scotsman territory. Peter Singer politely tolerated Alex making absurd claims (e.g., that a soldier diving on a grenade for his brothers probably experiences such intense pleasure in that moment that it exceeds the future pleasures he sacrifices). Michael is a thinker who would absolutely set Alex straight on this point.
@@indef2def would love to see it!
@@indef2def yup Alex kinda has gone off the rails... Most philosophers do it seems.
@@indef2def What's the problem with "maximize pleasure"? You can reframe it as maximize satisfaction if it helps but is the same thing (as satisfaction is reduced to feelings), and it is true. The soldier diving on a grenade reacts to the perceived unsatisfying feeling of not diving (meaning of not living a life of not fighting for what he loves in general). Thats why he does what he does.
Even though it is not practicaly sound advise to tel someone persue pleasure as this is easily misinterpreted and conflated with egoistic persuing of spesific type pleasures, plilosophicaly and in an ultimate sense, only pleasure matters. What else meaningful even exist apart from consciousness?... Everything else is a meaningless conept. Everything has to be reduced to consciousness in order to gain meaning.
@@danedane4444 What you've outlined there is exactly what the No True Scotsman fallacy is. "Pleasure" has a pretty clear range of meanings in ordinary language, and the soldier diving on the grenade sure isn't it. It would be barely more reasonable to claim "everyone acts to maximize avocados", and then suppose that the soldier must have envisioned himself getting lots of avocados while diving on the grenade.
YES!!
I’m so happy to see this. Thank you for your work
Edit:
I’m about 8 minutes in, and (though I really like Huemer) he is coming off as being pretty rude. I hope he’s okay
I don't see that at all :D
@@richardgamrat1944 I’m happy you feel that way! I hope I’m wrong. We’ll see as I finish the video
He's very quick to call people who don't happen to agree with his views as retards, crazy, insane. Sounds quite arrogant to me.
Yeah he’s coming off as a liberal college student who really hasn’t learned enough about evolution to have sophisticated views on things like morality.
This a typical problem with people who are primarily activists. They want to change rather than understand. And the issue is they think their worldview is the obviously correct thing to change into. So much egocentric bias, sloppy language, and circular logic, and I’m only twenty minutes in.
This is the first time I’m hearing of this guest so I don’t know who he is but it’s definitely hard to listen to. Ricardo clearly knows more about evolution than the guest but his questions are being answered, as I said, like a college kid with a opinionated world view. rather than a scientist.
I say all this as an evolutionary science nerd and vegan of many years. I probably don’t disagree with his ethics but his explanation and understanding of such things seems juvenile thus far. Hopefully it gets better.
@@CarlYota Can you give some examples where his reasoning is misguided or something?
Obrigado pelo vídeo.
Sobre a questão da eliminação das espécies carnívoras do topo da cadeia alimentar e do impacto nos ecossistemas, há uma série de vídeos muito interessantes no TH-cam sobre a importância dos lobos no parque de Yellowstone.
(P.s. mas abandonar a chanfana é que não! Além do mais, sendo feita com carne de cabra já com uma certa idade, só é preciso esperar que morra naturalmente!😁)
I love Huemer I disagree with his abortion violinist thing tho because the violinist is attatched to whatever part of the body that is made to serve some purpose that’s not good but the fetus is in the uterus which is clearly solely for the growth of a fetus so women have a biological responsibility and are the only ones with that responsibility so I don’t know in terms of morality I guess knowing that the fetus won’t become a bicycle or a cell phone that it always becomes a human it’s at least obviously obstructing life maybe not outright murder so whatever you know it’s wrong.
"Where do those intuitions come from?" Fundamentally the human nervous system. Ethics inherently include emotions ( and we reason about ethics after the affect). For example, if humans were just brains with no emotive context ( e.g., just non-emotive information processing machines. e.g., like computers are), would we even be motivated to think about survival?. What would be the value of survival without the experience of pleasure or the hope of experiencing joy? Other than the physiological mechanism of pain avoidance ( which promotes survival).
I don't think we can demarcate conscious experience and emotion. Therefore, we can't demarcate cognition and morality. For morality without emotion ( e.g., pain, pleasure, etc) is what? Can someone think of a reason to have a sense of right or wrong without a sense of pleasure and pain? What would morality be guidance for?
Another way to think about morality is that it's specifically a social psychological phenomenon. Imagine you were born alone on an island that only consisted of mega-flora (non-microscopic plants, fungi). Due to the interface between human psychology and plants anatomy and physiology ( e.g., plants don't behave like conscious agents), it's likely that a person born alone on an island of plants would have no need for any sense of morality. In other words, there would be nothing to "hurt", nothing to demand it be treated as an equal.
Morality is social psychology specific.
I'm surprised that Michael thinks funniness is a paradigmatic example of subjectivity, since some of his core arguments for moral realism (the arguments from the syntax and semantics of moral language) would seem to support realism with respect to (at least certain levels of) things like humor, personal beauty and aesthetic value. We don't use the same language about pizza topping preference -- unless we're joking -- as we would use for someone who claimed that Justin Bieber was a better songwriter than Bob Dylan, for example, or that one of Louis C.K.'s famous bits was less funny than "What's a ghost's favorite fruit? A boo-berry." There seem to be plenty of views about such features that are so stupid they'd incline me to say the person didn't really understand what the feature in question actually means, in pretty much the same way you and I would with moral claims.
2:57 - Is good dependent on the attitude of observes?
Michael says: No. Torture babies is wrong. Even if they change their attitudes *it is still wrong*.
But says who if no one says? This is clearly a judgement. 'Torturing babies is wrong' is not an independent fact such as gravitational constant, it depends on someone judging it. So, who makes the judgement that *torturing babies is wrong*? And who ever knows it or intuits it if there is no subjects to do so? God?
9:30 - The argument is whether all there is to *ethics and morality* is debating about ethics and drawing conclusions on soundness of each argument.
Michael clearly says: No, because we can intuit ethical choices.
Yet, philosophers involved in ethics all have intuitions, but arrive at different moral conclusions. How so if intuitions are right? How does that say about ethics? Which intuition is then absolutely right, objectively, independently of the speaker, and which answer right? Who decies on the issue in moral realism, God?
Everyone knows-knows their intuition is true, but can anyone be sure-sure? Nope.
I really can't see how one can solve moral realism this way.
>Michael says: No. Torture babies is wrong. Even if they change their attitudes *it is still wrong*.
But says who if no one says? This is clearly a judgement.
I guess the moral realist would say that something being a judgement does not preclude it from being true or false independent of the attitudes of observers. We make a judgement that the observable universe began in a Big Bang 13.7 bilion years ago based on the available evidence. But our judgement can be either factual or fail to correspond to reality.
>'Torturing babies is wrong' is not an independent fact such as gravitational constant
Well, the moral realist would say that it is a fact that is as independent as the gravitational constant. Although ethical intuitionists like Huemer would be more likely to compare ethics
to something like mathematics that is known a priori and has no causal powers.
>Yet, philosophers involved in ethics all have intuitions, but arrive at different moral conclusions. How so if intuitions are right?
Well, it's an obvious strawman. Of course nobody thinks that our intuitions about anything, including ethics, are infallible. It's just that they have a tendency to lead us to the truth. The fact that we are not infallible does not mean that everything goes. You know, physicists judging the same evidence sometimes draw different conclusions as to what theory is the best explanation of the data. Some of our eminent physicists have different intuitions than others concerning whether the cosmos as a whole had a beginning or what is the best interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the latter case it may not be even in principle possible to solve the disagreement by gathering more data. Clearly all of these intuitions cannot be correct. But I don't see how it shows that we can never rely on intuition. There are many cases where physicists of course do agree that intuitively the theory is the best fit for the data. For example, physicists agree that the Earth is approximately a sphere and is not flat. You can make similar examples when comes to economics (economists agree that rent control causes housing shortages, but disagree what is the magnitude of impact of taxes on work effort), or indeed philosophy.
Similarly, in ethics you can make up thought experiments where people have different intuitions and we are not able to resolve the disagreement. But there are many scenarios that strike almost all of us as clearly morally wrong and so we have good grounds for accepting that it is in fact the case. For example, we may disagree about whether abortion at a particular point in the pregnancy is equivalent to murder. Indeed, there is a lot of disagreement about this even in the two camps. For example, pro-choice people disagree what should be the cut-off for the age of the fetus for which abortion is permissible - 3 months, 5 months or maybe something else. But I don't see how the disagreement about abortion casts doubt on the fact that for example, Ted Bundy's murders were wrong.
>Which intuition is then absolutely right, objectively, independently of the speaker, and which answer right?
Well, if eminent physicists disagree then I guess we laypeople should withhold judgement. Similarly, if there is much disagreement about a particular sceanrio among ethicists then similarly we don't know what is in fact correct.
>How does that say about ethics?
That we are not infallible and intuitions can mislead us, just like in all other areas of life.
>Who decies on the issue in moral realism, God?
Who decides in external world realism which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct if physicists disagree? God?
>Everyone knows-knows their intuition is true, but can anyone be sure-sure?
Yeah, that's the problem with human beings that we are often too damn confident that we know the truth. But I don't see how this in anyway undermines moral realism, anymore than the disagreement about the intepretation of quantum mechanics undermines that there is indeed a fact of the matter who is right or who is wrong.
@@marcinteklinski3206
">'Torturing babies is wrong' is not an independent fact such as gravitational constant
Well, the moral realist would say that it is a fact that is as independent as the gravitational constant."
He/she could say that, but not substantiate it. In fact, as an intuitionist, you are trapped in this tragic situation with no options. That 'Torturing babies is wrong' is neither obtainable nor it is falsifiable. Thus many people would deem it something akin to a vivid metaphysical speculation or pseudoscience at best, rather than speaking about facts.
">Yet, philosophers involved in ethics all have intuitions, but arrive at different moral conclusions. How so if intuitions are right?
Well, it's an obvious strawman."
Strawman against whom? I did not attribute this view to anyone in particular. This is just my argument coming from the observation of a tumultuous and fruitless endeavour that ethics has been in the 20th century until now. A spectacular farce that produced a gazillion conflicting stances.
"Of course, nobody thinks that our intuitions about anything, including ethics, are infallible. It's just that they have a tendency to lead us to the truth. The fact that we are not infallible does not mean that everything goes. You know, physicists judging the same evidence sometimes draw different conclusions as to what theory is the best explanation of the data."
This misses the mark. Physics and science are predominantly about what 'is' business, and not 'ought to be' business. They are not saying that it would be 'good' if there were no quarks.
"Some of our eminent physicists have different intuitions than others concerning whether the cosmos as a whole had a beginning or what is the best interpretation of quantum mechanics."
Interpretation of facts and forming hypotheses (along with predictions) is not analogous to the discourse about values. Firstly, if 'Good' is at all a natural property, then it cannot be predicted in the same way as orbital velocity, or the existence of Higgs Boson in the great hadron collider. Secondly, 'Good', and what it is, isn't the same as the event GW150914 that occurred in 2016. Thus, ethics is not subject to the deductive discourse which is characteristic of the modern scientific method.
"But there are many scenarios that strike almost all of us as clearly morally wrong and so we have good grounds for accepting that it is in fact the case."
Here again, you are making the point that logically says, 'some of us think X is wrong', but it's not the same as 'the sun did rise this morning'. The former is a non-universal proposition, it is contingent logically. The latter is the truth that cannot be otherwise. Atop of that, existentially (w/ quantifier), you will always find a logical counterexample to the claim that 'Ted Bundy's murder was wrong'.
">Who decies on the issue in moral realism, God?
Who decides in external world realism which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct if physicists disagree? God?"
Interpretations of quantum physics are predominantly the domain of philosophy of physics, not physics by itself as science. An enormous number of modern physicists (i.e. Richard Feynman) loathe such unfound metaphysical theorizing.
Absolutely, completely circular reasoning.
Took the words right out of my mouth. No offense to Huemer, i love his political authority book but his views against anti realism miss the mark.
'Torturing babies is wrong' is not an independent fact such as gravitational constant, it depends on someone judging it.
All knowledge including scientific knowledge relies on basic intuitions at its core. You can keep asking "why"... eventually you'll get to elementary assumptions that you simple accept to be true. (Munchaussen trilemma). Gravitational constant requires all the assumptions needed to make science and math possible.
There are basic elementary logical mathematical intuitions... similarly there are basic moral intuitions. It is simply true that "pain and suffering in and of itself" is a bad thing. To me it's as clear as the law of noncontradiction. I can't prove the law of noncontradiction. I can't prove the pain principle.
If someone denies the law of noncontradiction, then discourse is impossible. Same way if someone thinks torture of babies is ok, then discourse about morality is impossible. We start with some kind of framework of common intuitions. It's really pointless to debate why these base intuitions are true. All we can strive for is some kind of consistency.
That's what I find wrong with the moral anti-realist. The inconsistency. They all make "should" statements. They're involved in politics... they argue against slavery and at the same time they say there's no fact of the matter that slavery is a bad thing. Makes no sense to me. Is it some kind of wordplay or deception they are engaged in?
4:02 "I can just see that it's wrong" isn't a scientifically verifiable is it?
All science, all knowledge depends on a basic set of assumptions or intuitions that cannot be proven.
If sentience is necessary condition of moral significance, then we might just breed animals and humans that are incapable of having pain and use them however we want or what?
Yeah but we’ll have sophisticated robots (including soft body robots for certain tasks) much much sooner. Also lab meat is already here. We don’t need insentient human slaves, nor insentient animal farms. And there would be also the danger of mistaking that they don’t have sentience-you can’t look at me and say what’s "inside" my mind, experience my experience, if I have any or I’m just a sophisticated intelligent piece of dead matter.
I mean, why not? Also Huemer is close to a vegan, but he thinks it's ok to eat oysters because they have no nervous system and probably feel no pain.
Yeah, but a being like that is almost impossible to create and be a human? What you're describing is a plant type thing.
Isn't a philosopher supposed to avoid logical fallacies?...
10:55 WAT
Michael Huemer is a supreme question begger. If you think harm could be good you're irrational and crazy... Why?... Well cause you disagree with Michael Huemer. See how that works? Huemer should revisit epistemology and relearn what the problem of the criteria is.
Extremely lazy interview. Didn't discuss pesticides and the large number of animals killed by them to produce fruit and vegetables. Didn't discuss the morality of pest control or conservation or pets. Not at all clear if his problem is with current farming practices and why not just work to improve them. Does he have an issue with free range farming?
However, your mentionning the problems many ecologists are aware of. And advocate agri-ecologcal farming methods that don't use pesticides. FYI, those pesticides also contamniate our foods ( via humans eating the animals that digest perticdes or pesticide residues on the plants we eat).
There are better alternatives to reduce the amount of insects on agricultural plants. e.g., using the insects natural predators. Plant agri-mono-culture is also harmful to the environment.
To quote "Does he have an issue with free range farming?"
He answered that question. Becasue plants don't suffer death like animals do, the ethical approach is to replace all forms of animal meat with "meat alike" & / or cultivated meat products ( i.e., no killing animals, "free range" or not, for food").
I assume you don't want to kill animals just for the sake of killing, therefore, why wouldn't you prefer to eat meat ( cultivated), without an animal having to die to feed you? Though as Micheal Huemer mentioned, there will be those oddities that are amoral and therefore will just desire to kill animals, therefore, eventually we will need to make killing animals illegal ( in modern cultures killing animals isn't a neccasity, it's a cultural norm)
Using pesticides to protect food/property doesn't seem as bad as actively breeding animals to really bad life conditions (and sometimes also with selected traits that would make their life worse in itself, e.g the case of broiler chickens) and killing them for trivial reasons (tastes nice). Also, those circa 70 billions land animals we kill every year also need to eat something. Crops grown for animal feed use pesticdes too.
I agree with you.
He talks about (almost) all of that in his Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism
@@richardgamrat1944 "crops grown for animal food use pesticides too"
Right! Also animals seem to be given vitamin B12 supplementation (as per an Earthling Ed video) going against another often invoked issue, namely that without meat we need to take "pills". And most soy production is destined to farmed animals, not human consumption, which contradicts another critique, that vegans lead to deforestation for soy cultivation. People who criticize veganism seem very sensible to all sorts of things-from deforestation, use of pesticides, to "harming vegetables", to depriving millions and billions of farmed animals from existing, etc-but they don’t seem to have any qualms about what happens in the filthy, overcrowded, disease ridden hellish places where our food animals live their lives. That’s a very peculiar mix of sensibility & ignorance, of outrage & complacency 🤷