The evil that men do
Tyler Cowen linked to an excellent observation by Ross Douthat:
The point is that as a society changes, as what’s held sacred and who’s empowered shifts, so do the paths through which evil enters in, the prejudices and blind spots it exploits.
So don’t expect tomorrow’s predators to look like yesterday’s. Don’t expect them to look like the figures your ideology or philosophy or faith would lead you to associate with exploitation.
Expect them, instead, to look like the people whom you yourself would be most likely to respect, most afraid to challenge publicly, or least eager to vilify and hate.
Because your assumptions and pieties are evil’s best opportunity, and your conventional wisdom is what’s most likely to condemn victims to their fate.
Saturos sent me a post that discusses (among other things) how the group that formed to promote free speech on campus eventually become the most powerful opponent of free speech on campus.
I’m also reminded that the group that fought hardest for monetary equilibrium in the 1970s (the hawks) became the group most forcefully promoting monetary disequilibrium in the 200os.
And that the group that fought hard to engage the US in the fight against fascism in the 1940s (those opposed to isolationism) became promoters of fascist regimes during the Cold War.
And the group that fought for liberal reforms in the 1800s eventually began promoting eugenics.
And the group that formed to promote the liberation of women ended up promoting laws against prostitution and pornography.
I just got back from a Mont Pelerin meeting in Hong Kong. I was on the panel discussing the “The Coming Inflation Threat.” Of course I said that there is no inflation threat. After the meeting a young person from Australia told me that among his generation of classical liberals the general view is that “If they can’t have an Austrian world, their second choice is a Scott Sumner world.” Naturally I was flattered, but of course if it ever happened then at some point I’d become a force for evil in the world.
PS. The conference was excellent—much better than I expected.
PPS. We may not have a Scott Sumner world, but Saturos sent me a post showing that at least I am on the map. Indeed 4 economics blogs made the map. Three certainly belong there—about the fourth I have . . . no opinion.
PPPS. This seems relevant to the post:
There is a single characteristic, I argue, that defines and unites the cognitive community that you and I share if you are reading this (the community of nerds). These days we often identify as rationalists, skeptics, or atheists, interested in cognition and cognitive biases; we are likely to eat LSD at Burning Man. We read analytic philosophy, science fiction, and LessWrong. We are intelligent, socially awkward, and heavily male. Is there a good name for that?
Lucid Dream
Intelligence and social awkwardness partially explain many of the patterns of our community, but neither is the characteristic I have in mind. This characteristic may be explained by analogy to lucid dreaming (incidentally, a common interest of our members). Dreams ordinarily fool us; despite their incoherence, we accept them as fully real while we are in them.
With effort, over time, you can get in the habit of performing “reality checks” during waking life: trying to push your fingers through solid surfaces, perhaps, or to breathe with airways closed. When asking, “am I dreaming?” and testing coherence becomes enough of an aspect of everyday reality, you may start performing reality checks in dreams, too. If you are successful, your reward will be an insight denied to most people: knowledge of the fact that you are dreaming.
Dreams demonstrate that our brains (and even rat brains) are capable of creating complex, immersive, fully convincing simulations. Waking life is also a kind of dream. Our consciousness exists, and is shown particular aspects of reality. We see what we see for adaptive reasons, not because it is the truth. Nerds are the ones who notice that something is off – and want to see what’s really going on.
Our People
Communal belief – social reality – and the sacrednesses that it produces are precisely the powerful layers of distortion that we are likely to notice (and hence have a chance at seeing through). We are less able than normal humans to perceive social/sacredness reality in the first place, and to make matters worse, we are addicted to the insight rewards that come from trying to see through it even further. Autism is overrepresented in our community; depression, too. Autism is associated with a reduced ability to model other brains in the normal, social way; this failure carries even into modeling the mind of God, as autism is inversely linked to belief in God. The autistic person is more likely than the neurotypical to notice that social reality exists; we might say the autistic person gets a lucid dreaming reality check for the great social dream with every inscrutable (to him) human action he witnesses.
Mild depression removes pleasurable feelings from everyday life; it interferes with a mechanism for sacredness-maintenance distinct from the theory of mind path autism blocks. Meaning is deconstructed in depression; social connection is weakened. Ideas and things that for normal individuals glow with significance appear to the depressed person as empty husks. The deceptive power of social and sacredness illusions is weakened for the depressed person (as are certain other healthy illusions, such as the illusion of control). This is not necessarily a victory for him, as self-deception is strongly related to happiness; the consolation of insight may not make up for the loss of sacredness in terms of individual happiness. The characteristic that distinguishes us is not necessarily a good thing. Our overdeveloped, grotesque insight reward seeking is likely maladaptive, and is probably not even doing our individual selves any good. Extremists – those most capable of perceiving social/sacred reality – are happiest.
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7. September 2014 at 09:54
While the Douhat quote has a ring of truth, it reality, the evil people are the ones who want to make the rules. They are easy to identify, as they say things like, “There ought to be a law,” “We need to do this for the children,” and, “This is unfair.” These people need to be ridiculed at every turn.
7. September 2014 at 10:59
I think major freedom is mildly autistic
7. September 2014 at 12:02
I think I got to you, Edward. You’re mentioning me unsolicited now.
That’s good. Associate respect for and protections of private property with my name, and you’ll never be able to drag my name through the mud. You’ll only keeping showing yourself as intellectually unwilling to think of ways to deal with complex social problems using something other than “Derp, gubmint hammer work good.”
7. September 2014 at 12:15
That map was made by Scott Alexander at slatestarcodex. If you are not familiar with Scott’s writing: you should be familiar with Scott’s writing. Have a look at for example http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
7. September 2014 at 12:21
The principles underlying these various group’s “crusades” can be closely scrutinized such that when taken to their logical conclusions, directly opposite activity is the result.
There is always more to the story than the true, but not detailed enough aphorism “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
Try to look for the fundamental principles guiding these groups. For the “pro-free speech” group on campus, are they really fighting for hearing things they themselves loathe, or are they fighting to get only their “approved” message heard? Or something else? Asking and probing the intellectuals guiding these movements is paramount.
There are “timeless” principles that always lead to bad outcomes in the logical extremes. Collectivism is one. Seemly tempered and benevolent in the short run, but at its core, when taken to the extremes results in outcomes not even the initiators intended, but are welcomed by the dregs of society who would love to take advantage.
What Tyler is hitting on by linking to the post by Douthat, is that in order to know if a given “crusade” is sustainable and not containing a seed of its own destruction, is for the philosophers to use what appear to be “dogmatic” and “non-pragmatic” principles. It is like advising a person to not take that first hit of meth, even though it won’t kill the person, and might even make them feel good for a time. The principle of “Small increment changes” with no absolute principle as the end point that you are willing to go, that short term pragmatic approach will carry with it a seed of destruction.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but in the extreme, like the posted examples in this blog post show, half a$$ing things for opportunistic reasons, will eventually be overwhelmed by reality and bring about counter-productive effects and actions.
Sumner you wrote:
“After the meeting a young person from Australia told me that among his generation of classical liberals the general view is that “If they can’t have an Austrian world, their second choice is a Scott Sumner world.” Naturally I was flattered, but of course if it ever happened then at some point I’d become a force for evil in the world.”
That is kind of why I post on this blog. The timeless principles I see in your arguments are those that cannot help but become “obviously” evil, because NGDPLT carries with it a seed of evil, namely, that it is OK for some people to initiate force against others in a particular, limited way, to accomplish the fire-fighting like policy of printing money and preventing massive unemployment and likely political chaos across the country. Nobody ever doubted your sincerity. It is the logical conclusions that such “monetary policy” thinking goes that is the real concern. Is it worth it for us to live comfortably another day and move another step closer to that evil end, rather than toiling and building a solid foundation today and moving towards the good end?
7. September 2014 at 12:33
Just a few ago Scott acknowledged there is no such thing as moral objective truth. this entails among other things that one cannot trust any first principles to conclude there is an objective reality outside our mind.
now one of the first principles of reason is the law of non-contradiction.
Now look at the title of his post “the evil that men do”
how can one perceive evil when truth doesn’t exist?
just a reminder scott – in your world there is no good and evil – beheading a man or giving him water when he is thirsty – there is no difference in your world because right and wrong are relative.
7. September 2014 at 12:57
JG:
Right, even the seeming “rational humble skeptic” argument that there is no such thing as moral objective truth, contains with in it a seed that when taken to its logical conclusions, leads to exactly that, not only no grounds for believing giving a thirsty man water as morally better or worse than beheading him, but also as you point out no grounds for even identifying good and evil in the first place.
7. September 2014 at 14:56
JG, You said:
“just a reminder scott – in your world there is no good and evil – beheading a man or giving him water when he is thirsty – there is no difference in your world because right and wrong are relative.”
????????
7. September 2014 at 15:13
Robert, I’m confused. I had the impression that the writer of that post was anonymous. Is that wrong?
7. September 2014 at 15:40
The title—the title! —of a Mont Pelerin panel was “The Coming Inflation Threat” ?!?
Egads.
7. September 2014 at 16:10
Scott, what do you think of Rogoff’s recent piece on dormant inflation threats [http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/kenneth-rogoff-debunks-rumors-of-the-demise-of-threats-to-price-stability]? I think his point was that, even if central banks know how to control inflation nowadays, they may make a political choice not to. He is not predicting inflation problems in the US or Japan anytime soon, but speculates about inflation threats the could have arisen in the Euro periphery had they not been on the Euro.
For me, the piece highlighted that inflation is not just about monetary economics but public choice too.
7. September 2014 at 16:22
Scott – you are self-contradicting in your title and all your writings.
I thought my examples were clear – cutting off someone’s head is evil, and offering water to the thirsty is charitable. – if the objective reality or truth doesn’t exist, as you believe, then good and evil don’t exist. how can you call something evil?
first principles, like the law of non-contradiction, can’t be proven, but most people understand this concept is true.
The fact that we can’t prove first principles doesn’t mean we can’t understand objective truth.
You are self-refuting in your denial about truth because you believe what you teach and write about is rooted in the truth (or as much truth as economics can illustrate about the way the world works).
or else why waste your time and breadth?
7. September 2014 at 17:28
Good and evil don’t have to be truthful concepts. They only have to be useful concepts, in that they effect changes in the experience of living. I can talk all I want about the incoherence of the colloquial usage of “free will”, but if someone tries to dominate me, “free will” bumps into enough emotive responses and values to be useful. Ambiguity might even be a strength, as these terms are flexible enough to adjust to fluid subjective valuations in differing contexts.
7. September 2014 at 17:37
Dear A:
You are also self-refuting. Why? At the same time you say the truth doesn’t exist, your claim about the absence of objective truth is, in fact, a truth you claim to believe.
Even someone as smart as Scott can’t escape this self-refuting logic.
7. September 2014 at 17:45
JG:
Sumner chose the philosophy of Richard Rorty as the basis for the true nature of human knowledge. Yes, you’re right, it self-contradicts. But they don’t care, because even the concept of self-contradiction isn’t sufficient for rejection.
I can tell that you are a Rationalist. Rorty, in his book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”, writes that Rationalism:
“…is a desire for constraint””a desire to find “foundations” to which one might cling, frameworks beyond which one must not stray, objects which impose themselves, representations, which cannot be gainsaid, (p. 315) The dominating notion of epistemology is that to be rational, to be fully human, to do what we ought, we need to be able to find agreement with other human beings. To construct an epistemology is to find the maximum amount of common ground with others. The assumption that an epistemology can be constructed is the assumption that such common ground exists, (p. 326).”
However, Rorty claims that no such common ground exists. Hence Rationalism is false, and a “relativist” position coined “hermeneutics” must be adopted. Rorty writes:
“Hermeneutics sees the relations between various discourses as those of strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts. This hope is not a hope for the discovery of antecedently existing common ground, but simply hope for agreement, or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement. Epistemology sees the hope of agreement as a token of the existence of common ground which, perhaps unbeknown to the speakers, unites them in common rationality. For hermeneutics, to be rational is to be willing to refrain from epistemology””from thinking that there is a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation should be put””and to be willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into one’s own. For epistemology, to be rational is to find the proper set of terms into which all contributions should be translated if agreement is to become possible. For epistemology, conversation is implicit inquiry. For hermeneutics, inquiry is routine conversation, (p. 318)”
This is the philosophical foundation Sumner has chosen.
What Sumner does not bother to do is ask the reasonable and appropriate question of self-reflection: “OK, if this is what Rorty claims, what then of his own pronouncements?”
If as Rorty claims there is nothing like truth based on common, objective ground, then all of Rorty’s talk can surely not claim to say anything true either. Like you alluded to, it would be self-defeating to do what they seem to be doing, namely, denying that an objective case can be made for any of their opponent’s statements, while at the same time claiming this to be the case for their
own statements. In so doing, one would falsify the content of one’s own statement.
Thus, in order to really understand Rorty correctly, one must first realize that he cannot truly be saying what he seems to be saying. Nor can Sumner be claiming anything objectively so and true. No, Rorty’s own talk can merely be understood as contributions to his and my and our entertainment.
In fact, the intellectual permissiveness goes even deeper. According to Rorty, we can’t even know whether or not we were in fact entertained by Rorty’s philosophy.
———————-
I think Hoppe writes it best:
“[Rationalism] claims that the notion of truth, of objective truth, of truth grounded in some reality outside that of language itself, is indispensable for talk of any sort, that language presupposes rationality, and hence that it is impossible to rid oneself of the notion of objective truth as long as one is capable of engaging in any language game whatsoever. For how else could we find out whether someone was in fact entertained by something, or that he was persuaded by it, that he understood or misunderstood what it was that had been said to entertain and persuade, and even further, whether there was something that meant anything at all and so could be understood, rather than merely being meaningless noises and wisps in the wind?
Clearly, we could not claim to know any of this unless we had a common language with commonly understood concepts such as “being persuaded” or “entertained” as well as any other term used in our talk. And just as clearly, this common ground that must be presupposed if we want to say anything meaningful at all is not simply one of free-floating sounds in harmony with each other in midair. Instead, it is the common ground of terms being used and applied cooperatively in the course of a practical affair, an interaction. And again, in making this claim, one could not possibly deny that this is so without presupposing that one in fact could cooperatively establish some common ground with respect to the practical application of some terms.
Language, then, is not some ethereal medium disconnected from reality, but is itself a form of action. It is an offshoot of practical cooperation and as such, via action, is inseparably connected with an objective world. Talk, whether fact or fiction, is inevitably a form of cooperation and thus presupposes a common ground of objectively defined and applied terms. Not in the sense that one would always have to agree on the content of what was said or that one would even have to understand everything said. But rather, in the sense that as long as one claimed to express anything meaningful at all, one would have to assume the existence of some common standards, if only to be able to agree on whether or not and in what respect one was in fact in agreement with others, and whether or not and to what extent one in fact understood what had been said. And these common standards would have to be assumed to be objective in that they would involve the application of terms within reality.
To say, then, that no common ground exists is contradictory. The very fact that this statement can claim to convey meaning implies that there is such common ground. It implies that terms can be objectively applied and grounded in a common reality of action as the practical presupposition of language.
7. September 2014 at 17:59
A:
“Good and evil don’t have to be truthful concepts. They only have to be useful concepts, in that they effect changes in the experience of living.”
To claim something is or is not useful in affecting changes in the experience of living, also implies a knowledge of truth, specifically, knowledge of the truth of the usefulness of a means to accomplish a specific goal!
7. September 2014 at 18:00
It also implies knowledge of the truth of what is or is not “experience of life” as well.
7. September 2014 at 18:21
If I were to adopt Rortyism, what would be wrong, then, with not being persuaded by his talk and, rather than listening further, hitting a Rortyist on the head rather than waiting until he perishes from following his own prescription of endless talk?
Obviously, if Rorty were right, nothing could be said to be objectively wrong with this. (In fact, would one not have to conclude that Rortyists could not even say that anything objective had happened?) The Rortyist might not regard my act of aggression as a contribution to the conversation of mankind (though we know that according to Rortyism he could not even objectively claim to know this to be the case), but if the talk-ethic cannot itself be grounded in something objective outside of talk, then if I happened to be persuaded of an ethic of aggression instead, and I ended our conversation once and for all with a preemptive strike, the Rortyist could not find anything objectively wrong with this either.
Thus, it is not only intellectual permissiveness that is preached by the Rortyians, it is total practical permissiveness as well””epistemological and, as the other side of the same coin, ethical relativism.
Rortyism is an example of a philosophy that when taken to its logical conclusions, should it ever become the dominant philosophy underlying most people’s beliefs, is a philosophy not inconsistent with encouraging totalitarian dictatorships of the most brutal sort. Nothing could be claimed as known to be “not useful in affecting changes in the experience of living.”
7. September 2014 at 18:47
BC, I haven’t seen that, but I suppose if Greece had not been on the euro they might have had some inflation.
JG, How can I break this to you gently. The passage of yours I quoted was utter nonsense. It makes no logical sense on its own, and has nothing to do with my views on epistemology. You are in way over your head. If you are being serious about what you believe that I believe, then I can only say that I feel sorry for you.
7. September 2014 at 21:59
Scott: regarding slatestarcodex: there’s only one person who blogs at that website unless it’s explicitly tagged as a guest post, and that map was his most recent post. It’s anonymous in the sense “Scott Alexander” is not his real name. Given he talks about his job as a doctor a lot he prefers to keep that private. It’s not hard to find out his real name if you go looking, but it’s not important either.
He has many very very good blog posts.
8. September 2014 at 00:05
Thanks Robert. I can tell he’s a great blogger by just reading a few of them.
8. September 2014 at 00:38
Thanks for the reply post Scott, and the link to the post on nerddom! I feel though that it’s not fair to lump in the community of depressed people, who may have some of the advantages the writer mentions but nonetheless are happy to take pills to switch over to the nondepressed category, whereas those of us with the author’s “characteristic that distinuishes us” would generally nonetheless prefer to remain as we are despite the happiness cost, even if we had a pill that kills it for us. Or am I just speaking for myself here?
Scott Alexander also used to post very productively under the name “Yvain” at LessWrong, to his own eternal regret.
8. September 2014 at 00:39
His ones on the social justice movement are the masterpieces I had always been looking for on that topic, until I found them on his blog. They needed a response as intelligent as his.
8. September 2014 at 03:58
“Paul Krugman Has An Important Warning To Scotland”
http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugmans-warning-to-scotland-2014-9
“If Scotland doesn’t have its own currency, it will not only be unable to provide a backstop to its banking system, it will be at the whim of UK monetary policy.”
8. September 2014 at 04:17
TravisV,
I don’t think that Scottish banks getting into trouble is very likely.
8. September 2014 at 04:37
How was copper wire invented?
Two Scottish guys were fighting over a penny.
8. September 2014 at 04:52
… don’t expect tomorrow’s predators to look like yesterday’s. Don’t expect them to look like the figures your ideology or philosophy or faith would lead you to associate with exploitation.
Expect them, instead, to look like the people whom you yourself would be most likely to respect, most afraid to challenge publicly, or least eager to vilify and hate. Because your assumptions and pieties are evil’s best opportunity
If evil arrived looking evil it would never be accepted by anyone and be no threat at all.
Real evil always comes looking as good – even (especially?!) to itself.
Who would not sympathize with these words of a loving mother written during personal hard times to her oldest child, from whom she was separated at the moment…
– Magda Goebbels, in the Fuhrerbunker, explaining her dispensing the cyanide pills to her six children who were with her.
Splendid. Beautiful. Admirable. Noble. Good. True.
8. September 2014 at 04:55
W. Peden,
Even if Krugman is wrong in this particular case, I still think he’s an incredibly brilliant guy.
8. September 2014 at 05:56
I agreed with the Austrians on most things through 2009, but their predictions of inflation didn’t pan out. It’s now pretty clear market monetarism is the correct theory.
8. September 2014 at 08:40
TallDave:
Austrians did not predict inflation. Nor did they predict deflation.
First, Austrian economics does not make predictions. At all. Austrian economics is just a system of the logic of action. It tells us how we come to know economic propositions.
Second, yes, some economists who are Austrians made predictions. But not all predicted the same thing. Some predicted high inflation by now, and some predicted low inflation. Most did not make predictions. You just heard the most vocal and popular among them, and they happened to have predicted dpuble digit inflation.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, there has been price inflation, not deflation. Stock prices have risen, commodity prices have risen, and yes, consumer prices have risen. So there has been price inflation. So those Austrians who predicted that (myself included) were “right.” But that doesn’t mean Austrianism was proven right.
Market monetarism is not a correct theory, because it assumes that spending growth causes real growth. This cannot be disputed because we are constantly told that declines in NGDP are the cause for the decline in real GDP. That is tantamount to saying that growths in NGDP cause real growth.
In fact, real growth in a division of labor is caused by economic coordination. Economics tells us that socialism, including monetary socialism, suffers from the “economic calculation problem”. There is no profit and loss signals observable in the issuance of money, because money is monopolized by the state. Without profit and loss signals in money, economic coordination ia hampered. This is what Austrian ecomomics tells us. It does not tell us what numerical rate prices of consumer goods will rise over a particular period of time after X amount of money is printed. Neither does market monetarism for that matter.
You have to understand Austrian theory if you’re going to claim you agree with it or disagree with it.
8. September 2014 at 08:48
JG:
Sumner wrote
“JG, How can I break this to you gently. The passage of yours I quoted was utter nonsense. It makes no logical sense on its own, and has nothing to do with my views on epistemology. You are in way over your head. If you are being serious about what you believe that I believe, then I can only say that I feel sorry for you.”
This is Sumner’s way of saying he refuses to self-reflect on his own epistemological premises, and doesn’t know how to respond without admitting your assessment is absolutely correct.
You are talking about the logical conclusions, which requires a “slower” method of inquiry, to borrow from Kahneman. It requires an investment of time that is unavailable, due to time being spent doing other things.
You’re asking for too much.
Don’t worry, I can assure you that you are not only not in over your head, but can actually help raise heads out of the sand.
8. September 2014 at 08:53
Rorty argued we should refrain from epistemology.
Anyone who claims to have studied and are utilizing an epistemology in one’s thinking, is contradicting Rorty’s thesis.
8. September 2014 at 09:04
The most blatantly obvious contradiction in pragmatism is the statement “I am not claiming to know truth, just what is useful”.
Claiming to know what is and what is not useful IS ITSELF a claim to knowing a truth about human life, and the human mind.
Like JG pointed out, claiming to know what humans cannot know, is itself a claim about what humans can know. It is a claim to a truth of the efficacy of the human mind.
Some people have a hard time dealing with the fact that ALL human knowledge presupposes and objective common ground.
8. September 2014 at 17:09
JG and Major Freedom, it seems like you two have misread the thread. The points you raise are not relevant to the discussion. The argument that good and evil don’t need to be “truthful” concepts, or even internally consistent, is not a comprehensive denial about the metaphysics of truth, but rather an examination of purpose specific applications of such metaphysics.
You two might be interpreting arguments based on conversations you have held elsewhere. But a clear reading of the post and the comment thread shows no such argument “I am not claiming to know truth, just what is useful.”
8. September 2014 at 18:09
A:
“The argument that good and evil don’t need to be “truthful” concepts, or even internally consistent, is not a comprehensive denial about the metaphysics of truth, but rather an examination of purpose specific applications of such metaphysics.”
A, I think you have misread the argument to which you are responding. The arguments we are addressing are not isolated to one you alluded to but did not get exactly right, which is the argument “There is no such thing as moral objective truth.” There is also the argument that Sumner made that he denies humans can know truth with a capital “T.” That is also on the table.
Our response is that both of those arguments are self-defeating.
Someone who argues “There is no such thing as objective moral truth”, must do so using clear language, arguments, logic and evidence – all based on the principle that truth is better than falsehood. In other words, one cannot consistently argue that there is no objective moral truth, because doing so is necessarily a claim to a particular objective moral truth.
The other argument, i.e. “Humans cannot know truth with a capital ‘T'”, is also self-defeating. It is itself a claim to an objective truth about how our minds are constituted.
I am not saying the argument in the thread is a “comprehensive denial about the metaphysics of truth”. I am saying the arguments are contradictory.
Telling me that there is no objective morality truth, cannot be regarded as true unless it is itself a claim of an objective moral truth. It cannot be gibberish, right? It cannot be *&^%*&$*&^%$, right? The person who makes a clear argument is borrowing from what Rationalism knows as objective morality.
8. September 2014 at 18:12
A standard argument is that morality does not exist in the real world. Sure, that is true, but so what? The scientific method doesn’t exist in the real world. Logic doesn’t exist in the real world. Numbers don’t exist in the real world.
Does that mean that science and mathematics are utterly subjective, and that any old opinion goes? Of course not. It is precisely the same with morality. Moral theories must pass the test of logical consistency, just as theories in science or mathematics.
This is how we know objective morality exists. We might not know the full content of it, but we know it’s there.
8. September 2014 at 20:13
One engineer’s design is duplicable by other engineers so we usefully describe such work as objective. But internally consistent morality does not obviously lend itself to objectiveness because of its susceptibility to varying preferences and subjective experience. If everyone came from the same stable mold, then perhaps your linkage would hold true. But you wouldn’t look at shared moral assertions, arrived at by actors with varying preferences and experience processors, and presume that you are seeing the shape of something objective. A variety of moral rules can be consistent without being universal, unless you make the tautological leap to require universality. And even given universality, “objective” morality becomes a statement about uniformity in experience and preference. You say that beating a person is wrong. Another person says that it is right and necessary. You counter with a list of your valuations and describe the deductive process to your statement. The other person does the same. At what point is it obviously true that one of you made a logical mistake?
9. September 2014 at 07:48
Saturos, I’d prefer the happiness pill.