I was listening to a couple of videos and the idea of morality came up. To their credit, they admitted that morality is entirely subjective, but they said that, if you start off with the idea that well-being is your goal, then you can make objective decisions from that point forward.
Except that’s absolutely not true.
Here’s the actual problem. Well-being is a nebulous term that can mean pretty much whatever you want it to mean. Whose well-being are you talking about? You can’t just say “everybody” because you can’t come up with a single moral precept that works equally well for absolutely everyone across the board. Most people? Well, which ones? Be specific. Why the people over here and not the people over there? Justify your answers.
Most of the time, and I don’t know if this is intentional or just the product of human self-involvement, but mostly, when I ask people this question, the people that they most want to defend the well-being of are people most like the individual making the claim. It’s a completely arbitrary decision. They care about the people who behave and think like they do and the ones who don’t, those people don’t warrant consideration.
So we can look at some really extreme examples, but you can take the lessons learned here and apply them to less extreme circumstances. If you say that you care about people’s well-being and happiness, and happiness tends to be a big component of the equation, then what about psychopathic murderers? They are made happy by killing people. Do you not care about their happiness? Or what about thieves? They might get personal satisfaction from figuring out how to steal expensive things. There are all manner of movies made about thieves that steal, simply for the joy of stealing.
Granted, most people don’t want to be stolen from and don’t want to be killed and I think it’s perfectly justified to go with the good of the majority while ignoring the good of the minority That’s still a subjective choice. It is deciding that some people are not worth as much as others because you simply can’t apply the same criteria across the board to everyone. That’s kind of a problem.
Let’s look back at the antebellum South, where slavery was the norm. Certainly, the slave owners benefited greatly from having slaves. They needed labor to work in the fields and having access to this cheap labor (cheap because they still had to buy them and feed them and clothe them) was certainly beneficial to the slave owners. It wasn’t to the slaves, to be certain, but how is this really any different than picking and choosing who is important and who is not? Slave-owners in the South absolutely outnumbered the slaves, hence choosing to focus on the majority good over the minority bad isn’t much of a stretch beyond what these people are saying, is it?
Of course, they will argue with that because, as I think it becomes clear when you talk to them, this isn’t about a set of objective moral standards, it’s an ethical system that they have invented in their own heads of what ought to be acceptable and what ought not. This is even more subjective than saying “we pick a standard and everything else is objective.” It’s nothing of the sort.
Because not everyone agrees with what constitutes well-being. I touched on that momentarily, but the simple fact is, not everyone agrees on what well-being means in the larger context of society. You can just look at politics and people on the left can say “screw everyone on the right” and people on the right can say “screw everyone on the left”. Who is right? How do you demonstrate it? Aren’t we right back to majority rules? This is where we have to talk about what constitutes well-being, who does it most directly benefit and who gets to choose the standards?
In other words, it becomes a horribly muddled mess. There are plenty of people on the left who think that the government should hand over a paycheck to absolutely everyone so nobody has to do any useful work if they don’t want to. They argue that this is the best for everyone because no one will ever starve or go without a roof over their head. Cool, but where does the money come from? If it’s enough money that most people don’t want to work, then you’re going to see runaway inflation and class warfare. If it’s not, then you’ve still got an underclass and prices are going to rise to balance the costs of society having to support this group of people who aren’t producing anything of value. How is this to the benefit of everyone if the people who are out there running businesses and making money have to pay a portion of their check to cover the expenses of those who don’t want to work? I know the left really like to tax the rich, but eventually, the rich will have enough and they’ll just leave and what do you do then? Hold them hostage? Make them slaves? What are your choices here?
Therefore the entire idea of well-being as your metric, it doesn’t ever get you to objectivity. I think the people who hold to that, who claim that once you pick your standard, everything else is objective, they know that it’s just not true and the people that I’ve asked about it, they behave very much like the religious. They obfuscate, they make excuses and, sooner or later, they run for the hills. These are hard questions that need to be asked and they simply don’t have any honest answers. It turns the entire thing into a purely subjective venture and that subjectivity is a moving target. Whoever is in power at the time, they get to decide which groups of people, almost certainly the ones on their side, get to be the favored groups and who is going to have to bear the weight of this well-being.
None of them can ever provide a solid answer for “what is well-being”, “whose well-being are you talking about” and “what do you do with the people who don’t agree with your standard or your proposed solutions?” They don’t have answers because they don’t think in those terms. Like the religious, they lack the capacity to step back from their emotionally-comforting position and evaluate how it would actually operate in the real world. Mostly, that’s because it doesn’t. Immediately, it turns into mob rule, groups of favored people against groups of unfavored people and anyone who can’t see that as a bad idea, I don’t know what to tell you. Who decides who is favored and who is not? Nobody can provide a good answer beyond “well, we’re favored, of course and our enemies are not!”
I’m not saying that well-being, as a starting point, isn’t a good idea but let’s not pretend that it will ever be an objective panacea like it’s pretended to be. Just saying “well-being” doesn’t get you anywhere. Well-being for who? Well-being in what way? Who gets to decide? What happens to those on the losing side? Can it really be well-being if there is a losing side? These are all things that have to be hashed out and these are questions that the well-being advocates really don’t want to talk about.
Really, I wonder why.
I really wish you would do some research into these topics before posting on them. You ask a lot of questions that you treat as rhetorical but that do have genuine answers that are freely available online.
The view that you’re talking about is most popularly given in “The Moral Landscape.” I agree that Sam Harris’ book isn’t very good, but he doesn’t pluck well-being out of thin are, nor does he fail to define it. He gives poor arguments for this, but he does give arguments. If you’re going to attack a position, you need to attack the reasons given for it!
It’s true that not everyone agrees on what well being is. But not everyone agrees on the shape of the earth, or whether God exists. You seem to think that their disagreement doesn’t mean that these questions have correct answers. So why would we think disagreement over this means anything special? Why can’t some people just be wrong?
You ask why we aren’t just back to “majority rules”, and the question is “why would we be?” There are two points you’re unfairly running together: you’re running “society is run through democracy” and “this concept cannot be properly defined.” These are different points, and you need to treat them as such.
You then do the usual “it must be subjective”, but we’ve seen so far that you haven’t engaged with real positions and you’ve made a few mistakes. But let’s say you hadn’t done that. Your point is still unearned. For instance, take something like Hursthouse’s Moral Naturalism. What is her view? Is it subjective? If it is, why? What mistakes does Hursthouse make?
You make some mistakes around conditionals. You say it is still subjective, etc etc. And this just trades on a poorly defined term. Let’s take standard conditionals. “If you want to be on time, you need to leave now.” “If you throw the ball at the window, it will break the window.” “If you want to stay in good health, you need to exercise.” These all look truth apt! And they don’t look subjective. They look like you have to agree that they’re motivating but that’s different from believing if they’re true. It seems true that if I throw the ball it will break the window. That is different from me caring if the window breaks.
You need to seperate out truth claims and motivation. One is always going to depend on the person, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be true!
You talk about how no one can provide an account of well-being. Well, I gave you two authors of different pedigree: Harris and Hursthouse. They both give accounts. You could look at Aristotle, as well. He’s pretty famous!
If you want people to take your criticisms seriously, you need to do more work in justifying your view.
No, he doesn’t and, as many moral philosophers do, he accurately says that well-being is a pretty standard baseline for secular morality. I don’t have a problem with that. It’s still an entirely subjective position to start. You are perfectly welcome to propose human well-being as an adequate place to begin and I would agree but that still doesn’t make it objective, nor can you say that any steps beyond that initial subjective choice suddenly become objective because not everyone agrees on what well-being actually means.
That brings us back to the fact that you’re not talking about human well-being, but the well-being of people who agree with you. The ones who don’t, they get left behind. Hitler made the argument that humanity would be much better off in a world without Jews. I’ve seen plenty of Muslims who think that anything but a 100% Muslim world is unacceptable and killing all of the unbelievers is perfectly fine. Both of those are dumb arguments but they are arguments nonetheless. Both of them are arbitrarily selecting a sub-set of humanity to serve as the model for all of humanity, yet when you think about it, so are the people who are selecting well-being and coming up with their own definition for what that means and how we ought to get there. There isn’t really any difference, other than an emotional one.
If we’re going to be using well-being as our standard and whatever selected methods for approaching this well-being as the rules, then we are at majority rules because there is no way to get all humans to agree on what “well-being” even means. There are probably some very wide, general ideas that you can impose, the ones that Matt Dillahunty uses, and I only use him because he’s very outspoken on the subject. “Life is generally preferable to death, health is generally preferable to sickness…” That’s great. Well what do you tell the terminal cancer patient like Brittany Maynard, who is going to die, who is in constant pain and who just wants to die? Is life still preferable to death? You have rules and then you have to continually make a series of exceptions because life isn’t that cut and dried.
If you think I haven’t engaged with the “real position” then feel free to present what you consider the real position and I’ll address it. I’m not going to have a conversation with a book, go ahead and present your view and we’ll discuss it. You also, no insult intended, do the same thing a lot of theists do, claiming that I’m making “mistakes” without ever pointing out what they supposedly are or how they are objectively wrong. They might not agree with your views but that doesn’t make them mistakes because you have never shown that your views are, in fact, correct in the first place. There are a lot of people out there, I’m not saying that you are but there certainly are a fair number who treat philosophy like a quasi-religion. “X said Y, therefore it’s true!” Yet I don’t care who said a thing, I care if you can actually demonstrate that said thing is actually true and that seems to be a problem for a lot of people. It’s like the people who run around thinking Jordan Peterson is hot shit. Well, they’re half-right. If he could stick to the things that he actually supposedly knows, he’d be okay, but he insist on running around waving a flag like he has any authority or demonstrable knowledge about anything else and he just makes a fool of himself. I don’t care if a guy says a thing. I care if we can evaluate that thing independently, entirely separate from the individual making the claim, and determine that it is true or likely true in the real world.
Again, you’re right back to pointing to people and I don’t care about the people, I care whether the ideas are independently corroborable on their own. Harris and Hursthouse and, heck, Kant, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Peter Singer, you can come up with your own list of moral philosophers, they all have their own opinions on the subject. How do we determine which, if any of them, are actually correct? There’s a lot of disagreement on the subject and none of them have more than words. Get beyond the words. Just because the words resonate with you, that doesn’t make them true. All of these philsophical schools have their own following, people who really like the words and concepts spouted by their pet philosophers. How do we determine which, if any of them, is actually valid or worth following?
That’s the real question that nobody seems to have an answer for. Maybe you can give it a shot.
You talk passed me in places here, and it hurts our ability to have a meaningful conversation.
You seem to think that my goal is to defend realism, and that you shouldn’t have to argue against a book. You’ve misunderstood my goal. I’m asking you to defend your positions on moral realism. You’ve made claims about how it is all appeal to emotions and so on. I’m asking specific questions as to why you would think that, and I’m asking what research you’ve done. Here is an analogy that I’ve seen before:
1. I claim the tallest mountain in the world is Ben Nevis.
2. When asked why I think other mountains aren’t taller, I don’t talk about other mountains, or any data around other mountains. I claim that other people are wrong about their mountains, but that’s it!
3. It therefore looks silly to think that my claim about Ben Nevis is the tallest mountain in the world is at all justified. It also happens that my belief is false.
I see you as doing something similar to the Ben Nevis mountain expert. You’re making a substantive claim about not only the strength of your position but the weakness of other positions. All I’m doing is asking you to justify that. I’ve tried to help you do so by pointing you towards famous and popular positions in contemporary literature.
If you offered a more modest claim, then I think your position would look stronger. For example, if you wrote “While I have not done much research, moral realism looks like a weak position to me” then that seems fine. Or “while I am unfamiliar with the specifics, I do not see how any position for moral realism cannot rely on emotion.”
I think the second proposition here is still wrong, and I’ve given instances of people who don’t appeal to emotion. Hell, Harris is meant to be one of them!
Let’s go through Harris. I wrote that I disagreed with Harris. However, I said that he does offer a defence of position and if you want to attack Harris you should attack his defence. You wrote “it is still entirely subjective.” But you didn’t say how, or what Harris’ argument is, or why it doesn’t work!
Again, there is a systematic failure to engage with this work critically.
You talk about wanting to evaluate things independently, and I think that’s virtuous. It’s also what I’m asking you to do! I’m saying that if you’re going to say all moral realism is wrong then you should have a look at popular arguments for moral realism. You can find short summaries of “The Normative Web” online, and that’s a good starting resource. Here is one such instance: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-normative-web-an-argument-for-moral-realism/
But again you seem to be mistaking my purpose – I’m not trying to defend a realism. I’m asking you your specific thoughts on specific accounts. I’m asking you what your criticisms of these accounts are, and why would think they’re any good! In short, I’m asking you to offer a defence of your position.
I’ve outlined a structure before about what I think a good defence would look like.
You end by asking how we figure out who is right. This is a bizarre question to ask, because you’re already doing it yourself! You’re saying Harris isn’t right! We agree that you can pass judgement on these views, and that some of them are poor.
How do we decide what the right view is? Well, why would we think that accessing meta-ethical truths differs from accessing any other views? I don’t think it does! I think that we learn about moral truths the same way we learn about any other truth, and I think we learn about meta-ethical views just as we might about any other topic.
If you think it is impossible to determine which is right then that’s fine. But why! Which of the positions I’ve mentioned commit the fallacies you’ve mentioned? Where do they do it?
Philosophy is about a critical assessment of arguments. You keep writing blog posts talking about the general state of meta-ethics but in those posts you don’t discuss any arguments found in meta-ethics! Why?
Again, I’m super happy to talk about this more. Especially somewhere with witnesses. I think it might help you understand better if I can talk to you, but hopefully you’ll be able to see from the comments of others where you’re going wrong. I think this is what happened with the Ben Watkins video?
1. If you claim that the tallest mountain is Ben Nevis, it remains your job to demonstrate that it is so through some objectively verifiable means. You just can’t get there with philosophy. Now I admit that there might be taller mountains than Everest, I haven’t looked it up, but if you count from the sea floor, some volcanic islands might be “taller”, but that’s a matter of definitions. I will agree with you, and I’ve said on numerous occasions, that a lot of supposed debates are just talking past each other because neither side takes the time to actually define the words that they are using in any useful manner. If everyone is working by their own definitions, what’s the point?
2. But that’s not an argument. If you are talking about the tallest mountain, it only matters in comparison to other mountains. You can’t be a “tallest mountain” in a category of one. It’s a totally useless waste of time. That’s why, in a discussion of that sort, I’d ask what you meant by “tallest” and tailor the discussion to that definition, or propose an alternative if I didn’t think yours was useful. It’s why, in religious debates, which I think we both have experience with so it’s a useful example, when you get debates on “does God exist”, you don’t see the atheist starting off with “what do you mean by God and how do you rationally come to that conclusion?” The debate would end right there because the theist doesn’t have a definition that anyone but the religious would accept. Therefore, in most debates, the atheist will let the theist smuggle in their theology, just so the debate can happen. I don’t think that’s an acceptable way to operate at all.
3. That part is fine, if, and only if, you actually care about the truth. Far too many people though, religious and otherwise, are operating on feelings, not facts. I just heard a call-in where someone said they believed in simulation theory, not because they could rationally justify it, but because they liked the implications that they came up with in their head. Your emotional comfort doesn’t actually change the way that reality functions. Feelings don’t matter but there are a lot of people who seem incapable of setting them aside.
Of course, I’m doing none of the above. I’m saying that, in the lack of any evidence to support moral realism, the only position that we have that actually fits all of the data that we can lay out, it seems to be the most realistic, at least prospectively. As soon as you get rid of a religious mindset, the question of where an objective morality could even come from becomes entirely incoherent. Where would you even get such a thing? And remember, my definition of objective is “beyond the control of any mind”. If God created morality, for example, than that would still be subjective because God came up with it. It’s a definition I’ve given many, many times before and I’ve used it consistently.
The question then becomes, where does morality come from if it doesn’t come from us, given the fact that we can’t even imagine where such a thing would spring from, much less provide any evidence for it. Once someone proposes a solution, how do they prove it? We can prove we’re here, at least to a reasonable degree. What else stands up to critical scrutiny? Nothing, nothing at all, at least not that I’ve seen.
You ask how anyone can come up with the “right” view, but that assumes there is a “right” view. That’s an emotional question, not a rational one. Just because you want a singular “correct” answer, that doesn’t mean that one exists. Wishes and dreams don’t make reality. We’re really left with arguing which is most utilitarian. You’re left arguing which of the many available options might get you to where you subjectively want to go and even there, not everyone is going to agree with you, so you don’t automatically get to proclaim victory because your own views are satisfied. It’s one thing to say “I’ve got these ten ways of looking at things, which one will get me to my favored position, in this current time and place?” There is no answer that will always be true for everyone. It’s all situational. It’s all subjective because we don’t even have a clue what it would mean to be objective. How would that happen? How would we demonstrate it? You tell me.
And no, what happened with Ben Watkins was a whole bunch of people with very strong emotional reactions decided to shit themselves. I asked several times for someone to demonstrate where I was wrong. Don’t tell me I’m wrong, prove it to me. Nobody could. It was all “I like Ben!” I don’t care who you like. I care what you can demonstrate and none of them could get anywhere remotely close. I was absolutely right about the things Ben did in that video. Not one person has ever shown that the things that he said were rationally defensible. Not one. If you want to try that one too, feel free. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere. Good luck anyway.
We seem to agree on 1, and so you hopefully agree that it makes sense for me to ask you why you think all moral realism is merely an appeal to emotion.
I think you also misunderstand what philosophy “is”. Philosophy isn’t something abstracted from empirical work or science. Nearly all the philosophers I know have to work with empirical data, and use empirical data to support their claims. This is the norm in modern philosophy, and as far as I know I haven’t referenced anything that isn’t modern philosophy.
Here is an example: one of the things I’ve worked on in the last few years is the ontology of dreaming. While doing that, I’ve studied neuroscience, and neurobiology. I’ve looked through data gathered through dream reports as well as data gathered by scientists on what the brain does while dreaming. I’ve looked at hallucinations and what it is like when someone hallucinates. When discussing responsibility and agency in dreams, I’ve looked at the same sorts of data.
Philosophy often is, and I think increasingly so, is a data driven enterprise. To say that one cannot get to verifiable conclusions via philosophy is wrong, and I think shows a misunderstanding of the field more generally.
We seem to agree on 2, as well! I think this is what you’re doing. You’re not talking about competing views, or even really defending your own view. In fact, you’ve said that being given modern examples is tantamount to busywork. I don’t think this is purposefully anti-intellectual, but it is still poor practice.
Then you retreat back into old habits: you talk about how without God moral realists are only using emotion! But we know that isn’t true, and I even linked you to an argument that doesn’t appeal to emotion once.
I’ve talked about tons of secular accounts, and you just keep banging the drum. Even if you still think you’re right, you owe it your own epistemic rigour that you’d update your view (at least how you express it) so that it deals with these criticisms.
Asking where morality comes from is a good question, and one that people have different answers to. The worrying thing to me is that you don’t seem to think anyone has provided an answer to it. Even if you think those answers are weak, you have to say what they are and why they’re weak! You’re claiming an expertise in this topic, so what answers do you think people give? Why are those answers poor answers?
I think there is a right view, and you seem to agree. I haven’t ruled out moral anti-realism as potentially right.
I don’t understand why you then talk about wishes and dreams. As far as I know I’ve treated you with respect, despite misunderstandings and continued deviances from the topic. You constantly talk about theism when I’m not a theist, and you talk about positions that I am not trying to defend. I find it genuinely insulting that you think what I’m going has anything to do with “wishes and dreams.”
And for what it is worth, utilitarianism is not a meta-ethical position. We’re discussing meta-ethics, not normative ethics. The two are often related, but there are many meta-ethics that can lead to utilitarianism. Including anti-realism.
I don’t think truth is subjective. I think statements like “truth to everyone” don’t make sense. I think in order for something to be true it has to pick out some real property of the world. IF someone doesn’t do that, it isn’t true.
I think people can disagree on the truth, but we’ve already talked about how important that is to their being a truth.
And finally, I really would enjoy a relaxed conversation about this. You can frame it as a debate if you want, or you can frame it as a conversation on the plausibility of moral truth. Either or, I think both would be helpful.
Sorry, I’ve been busy for a couple of days and I have no idea why WordPress isn’t auto-approving your comments, it’s supposed to do that after the first time.
Anyhow, as far as being an appeal to emotion, I don’t know that I’d phrase it that way, it’s just an emotional reaction to what the individual *WISHES* was true instead of what they can *DEMONSTRATE* is true. A lot of people want to believe in something larger than themselves. It’s largely why religion does what it does. Just because you want a thing though, that doesn’t mean that thing is real and that’s kind of the point. It’s why I continually ask people to step back from their beliefs and examine them objectively and a lot of people seem incapable. Just because people really want there to be an objective right and wrong, that doesn’t mean that there is one. People are, generally, lazy and that’s another reason why religion is so popular, because they’d rather have some magical man in the sky telling them what to do and how to think and how to behave than to have to work it out for themselves. That kind of thought is energetically taxing. Evolution has programmed your brain to keep you as lazy as possible, so that when you need that extra burst of energy, you have it in reserve. We see this throughout the animal kingdom and we’re no different.
Yet people still want these easy, quick answers, whether they actually exist or not. That’s why you see people like Matt, going back to an easy example, proclaiming that slavery is always, has always and will always be wrong, because it’s a lot easier to demand a universal than to understand that it’s a much more nuanced idea. He’s allowing his emotions to entirely run away with him on a number of different subjects and in that, he isn’t remotely alone. The only way to get away from it is to be aware that it happens and to be willing to expend the mental energy to constantly question your motivations.
Here’s where I’m going to disagree with you though. I don’t think philosophy is data-driven at all. I think it’s interpretation-driven. While yes, there is an increasing amount of data to be dealt with, while neuroscience is addressing the “how” things work, philosophy, and I’m not trying to put words in your mouth here so feel free to disagree, but philosophy is trying to explain “why”. It’s trying to find purpose, not mechanics. It’s trying to assign meaning to dreams, in your case, instead of just explaining how they happen and how the brain functions. Unfortunately, there might not be a meaning. There might not be a larger purpose behind it. Science can perform experiments and come to conclusions when things operate as they expect and do things that they predict. Philosophy has none of that. It has no means to demonstrate that the conclusions it comes to are consistent with reality. It operates by consensus, not experimentation. Different schools of philosophy come to different conclusions and have no means whatsoever to show which, if any of them, are actually correct.
This is where I think a lot of philosophers go wrong. They propose solutions to problems but they have no means beyond that to demonstrate that their ideas are actually true or valid. They get so attached to philosophy as a concept that they become convinced that it can do anything and that’s simply not true. It’s why I continually point out that the religious misuse philosophy in their desperate attempt to prove God. It is absolutely the wrong tool for the job. Yet no matter how many times I point this simple fact out to the religious, they can’t come to grips with it. They change the subject. They toss insults. They run away. They are more concerned with their feelings than they are with actual reality and unfortunately, they are not alone.
Therefore, I’m going to remain unconvinced until someone can present evidence that there is some kind of meta-ethical reality out there, just as I will continue to reject religious philosophical evidence until they can use the right tools and demonstrate that their gods are factually real. I’m not concerned at what anyone says. I am concerned over what people can demonstrate and so far, nobody has been very good at doing any of that. If you want to have a larger discussion, that’s fine. I’m not sure what it might do beyond what’s going on here, but feel free to make any suggestions you’d like.
Yeah, no problem with the late replies. I’m stuck marking papers so I haven’t had oodles of free time.
I don’t think philosophy is merely about the “why”, but also the “how” and the “what”. Philosophy is insanely general. I’m not trying to find meaning in dreams, nor is that really a project that is taken seriously in analytic philosophy. If you have the time, or the desire, you should try reading Jennifer Windt’s work on dreams. It’s insanely detailed and methodical. Here’s an abstract from a paper she published in 2010:
“The paper proposes a minimal definition of dreaming in terms of immersive spatiotemporal hallucination occurring in sleep or during sleep-wake transitions and under the assumption of reportability … It makes straightforward and investigable predictions by claiming that all these experiences have amodal spatiotemporal hallucinations as their common denominator.”
I don’t expect you immedaitely understand this or to read the paper. But Windt is taking empirical data, modelling it, coming up with a thesis and testing it. Then she’s publishing that in philosophy journals, and using that work in philosophy.
You might think that science is when you do experiments, and maybe that’s true? I was teaching philosophy of science earlier in the term and I’m not convinced that there is a difference between good science and good epistemology. But regardless, philosophy takes data and uses data. It isn’t mere conjecture, and it isn’t always a priori.
Take Hursthouse for example: when she’s talking about the human function she’s talking about how biology and evolutionary theory. She’s contrasting people with other animals to see if there are relevant differences. She’s building her theory out of the science that is available to her. This isn’t
You’re right that laypeople don’t investigate many of their beliefs. But I haven’t talked about laypeople. I’ve talked about professional philosophers who built careers doing the sort of work that you likely think is good. I think you have some powerful misconceptions about philosophy, especially modern analytic philosophy. And this is part of why I think you’d finding reading modern meta-ethics valuable.
Again, I think doing this in longer form (structured as either a debate or conversation) would be eye opening.
No worries. There are a lot of people online who figure if you don’t respond instantly, something is wrong. Not everyone has their nose in their phone 24/7.
I suppose it all depends on exactly what’s being discussed. Mostly, how something works is explained by science. How brains function is the job of neuroscience, not philosophy. It’s a physical mechanical process governed by the natural laws and testable by experiment. Philosophy just doesn’t have that kind of testable, experimental component. It can’t prove that anything that it says is factually correct, it operates through consensus, not critical scrutiny. I’m not saying there can’t be any value in examining dreams to figure out what they mean, if they actually “mean” anything, but that is going to be just an opinion. Granted, there’s nothing wrong with opinions so long as we keep in mind that they are opinions. Opinions don’t become facts just because lots of people hold them. That’s fallacious on its face. I’m sure there are lots of people who have done a lot of fine work on the subject but we have to keep in mind what all of this actually, demonstrably means.
And while I know this is a complete aside, you brought something up that made me think about it. A lot of people pretend that humans are “better” than animals by saying that animals don’t act like humans do. So what? Humans don’t act like animals do! Who decided humans were the natural standard bearer for reality? You have to have a coherent standard against which you can measure them and arbitrarily picking humanity, just because we, as humans, are emotionally attached to humanity, makes no sense, yet lots of people do it.
I think that plays into why most people, laypeople or not, rarely evaluate their views at all because they lack the capacity to step away from the things they are emotionally attached to and simply look at the reality as it is. We’ve already talked about a couple of different cases where this is the case, but trying to bring this back around to well-being, why should human well-being be the standard? Who cares about human well-being other than humans who have a vested interest in being well? That might be a decent standard for humans, but why is it a good standard full stop? If aliens showed up tomorrow, would we expect them to give a damn about human well-being? Why or why not? They probably don’t have a vested interest in our well-being. They likely have a vested interest in their own well-being, but that’s where the discussions come in about whether well-being is actually a universal standard that ought to apply across the board. Even we, as humans, can’t all agree on what constitutes well-being or whether well-being is even a good thing universally. That’s kind of the point of the article that I wrote, after all.
Again, if you have any ideas on how to do that, I’m entirely open to suggestions.
There are only so many ways I can say this: you’re question begging against the philosopher here. I’m saying that I’m a philosopher and I do this sort of work. Your retort seems to be that this isn’t actually philosophy. But why not? It seems like you’re assuming philosophy cannot take part in some activity because of your conception of what philosophy is, rather than what current philosophers are doing!
Philosophy doesn’t operate through consensus. Why would you think that? Can you give me an example of this happening in contemporary philosophy?
I specifically told you that philosophy was not about the analysis of meaning in dreams. I wrote: “I’m not trying to find meaning in dreams, nor is that really a project that is taken seriously in analytic philosophy.” You then wrote “I’m not saying there can’t be any value in examining dreams to figure out what they mean, if they actually “mean” anything, but that is going to be just an opinion.”
I took the time to explicitly write that this is not what philosophy is doing. I have said it is not what I am doing. I then cited the biggest name in modern dream work and told you that is not what she is doing either. You can go onto philpapers right now and look at recent analytic papers. They are not undertaking some Freudian project. That is not the goal, and I simply do not understand why you continue to think it is.
So, why do you think that is the case?
As to a longer form discussion I’m not sure. It’s tough to format things here. We can do an audio discussion? There’s lots of programs that do that. If you wanted to use dropbox, or some docu-sharing program we could do that instead/as well?
I take it that neither of us is in a desperate hurry for speedy responses, so it seems a shame to limit it to small textboxes!
Yet, I’m not. If you could demonstrate that I was, I’m sure you would have done it. This is why I am not impressed with what people say, only what they can demonstrate. What is it, specifically and in detail, that you think I’m doing wrong. Present your case.
And yes, philosophy does, at least to a certain degree, operate through consensus. That’s why you’ve got various schools of philosophical thought. Science also works through consensus much of the time. That’s why there’s a peer review process. The more people you can get on your side, the more credible your ideas are often thought to be. If there was no need for consensus, there would be no reason for philosophers or scientists to talk to each other and try to convince each other that they were right.
We really didn’t talk about dream research specifically, but if you want to, that’s fine. My point is that there are lots of things that you can study and try to glean some meaning from. However, it’s not what meaning you draw from a thing, at least IMO, it’s what meaning you can demonstrate is actually there. It’s getting from “I think this is meaningful” to “this is demonstrably true” that I think is the problem. YMMV.
Be that as it may, that’s really not what this discussion is about, is it? I get that you’re passionate about your project, but this was about moral realism, was it not?
I haven’t had a problem with working in this format, I haven’t yet run out of space, but if that’s something you really want to do, it’s fine. It’s easier and more efficient to just have the time to consider your responses anyhow, instead of being stuck in the moment where you have to come up with something off the cuff, at least IMO.