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The Irrelevance of the Status of Oughts
Submitted by Scott Scheule on Thu, 2008-06-05 23:54.
What I'm about to say strikes me as obvious, but no less illustrious a personage as a coblogger had to have the point explained to him, so I'll spell it out. [To be fair, we merely misunderstood each other: upon explanation he agreed with me.]
Much is made of whether morality is objective or subjective. While it's an interesting ontological question, when it comes down to the question of which moral system is right or preferable, the question is entirely irrelevant.
To wit, some seem to think that if they can prove morality subjective, then utilitarianism wins over rights theories. This is bullshit. If morality is subjective, then even the basic axioms of utilitarianism are subjective. There is no objective command: Thou shalt increase utility. Rather, there is only the preference of the individual for a world with more utility, which is just as subjective as the preference of an individual for a world with strong property rights, or no capital punishment, etc. By the same token, if morality is objective, then one can equally well believe that it is objectively right to increase utility or that it is objectively right to respect deontological rights.
Some also seem to think that believing morality subjective leads to moral relativism. This is just as wrong. To be sure, my subjective moral preference may be for a world where right or wrong is decided by community standards. But my subjective preference may just as well be otherwise. And by the same token, moral relativism could easily be true, if morality is objective. It would be a fact of the matter that whatever the community standards are, they fix right and wrong. Or not.
There is a tendency for some to pass off a particular morality as objective, while others are just baseless opinions. Economists love this. It gives one side a rhetorical punch--they can claim to be the one who doesn't believe in spooky disembodied moral commands. Rather they believe in cold hard scientific fact--that is, of course, they believe in their personal moral preferences. This leads to the same conversation again and again, where the other side has to point out that the ontological status of morality cuts both ways. But there's no winner in this game of More Materialist Than Thou.
It goes like this:
HALL: Hey, Oates, you stole my bag of M&Ms.
OATES: Shut up, Daryl, they make me happier than you.
HALL: You have no right to my bag of M&Ms! I do!
OATES: There are no such thing as rights.
HALL: Why not?
OATES: It's all just a matter of personal preference. You prefer to keep your M&Ms. Instead, we should just decide things on what makes people happier.
HALL: But isn't saying that we should make people happy a personal preference, too?
OATES: No, it's not. Here, let me draw you the Supply-Demand Graph.
HALL: Nice work. I'm glad we bitched and moaned until they gave us an easel. But I don't get the point of your graph.
OATES: Well, look, it clearly says that if I get the M&Ms, there's a net increase in efficiency.
HALL: So?
OATES: So that's good!
HALL: But what's good is just a personal preference!
OATES: Hmm. Well maybe what's good isn't a personal preference. Maybe morality is real, and the idea that you should give me the M&Ms is real too.
HALL: But maybe the idea that I should keep the M&Ms is real, too!
OATES: We're on.
Exit Oates.
HALL: Hey! Bring back my damn M&Ms!
In sum, the question of whether morality is subjective or objective, like the blogosphere, has theoretical but no practical import.
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In my own experience,
In my own experience, learning about subjectivism from the Austrians quickly led to something like non-cognitivism with the odd addition of God. Dropping that led me to Stirnerite egoism. I've got plenty of reason to take my own preferences seriously (I feel my own pain) but not so for others. There's a pragmatic reason to take others into account through something like contractarianism, but even Stirner himself would admit as much.
Doesn't do much for me. I
Doesn't do much for me. I could just as easily (and do!) prefer that other people not experience pain either. Another example I could have used was people thinking that moral subjectivism leads to selfishness--but that doesn't logically follow either, as one could just as easily prefer not to be selfish.
Are you a Stirner fan then? Is there a good work of his to begin with?
You could indeed prefer that
You could indeed prefer that others not experience pain. Es tut mir leid. However, though Clinton may have claimed that he "feels your pain", he was not literally hooked up to a machine that shocked him in accordance with some aggregate of utility. The pain you feel, even if it is the result of knowing others are in pain, is your own and may be quite unrepresentative of the pain of others.
The work from Stirner is The Ego and Its Own. He wrote something on education before that and a reply to his critics after Ego, but that's the big one. I've got the whole thing on one page here.
After you read Stirner you might want to check out L.A Rollins' myth of natural rights. I've written a preface to the republished edition coming soon from Nine Banded Books.
Biological self-centeredness
The logic of natural selection is self-centered or family-centered: our deepest desires are selected for because they enhance the success of our line. But the actual events of selection occurred over the last four billion years, so we have no direct access to that self-centered logic as it shaped us. We are like clockwork whose clockmakers died on average two billion years ago. As clockwork, we execute the instructions that he programmed into us, but the actual programming occurred ages ago.
What we have direct access to are our deepest desires, which command us and which we feel whenever any of them are frustrated. Here's the point I want to make: even if the logic of our shaping is self-centered, our current deepest desires need not be self-centered. While our deepest desires may tend to work to our benefit, their actual content need not be self-centered. We may be genuinely selfless, so that someone could vivisect us, sift through all the slices, reconstruct us completely, and find nowhere any neural pathway that revealed that our seeming selflessness was motivated by an underlying selfishness. There is, of course, an underlying selfishness, but that selfishness need not exist in the current circuitry of our brain - it may exist merely in the evolutionary logic that produced the truly selfless desires millions of years ago. That is, beings with certain selfless desires simply survived and reproduced better. This fact of differential survival, which can only be seen by rewinding time millions of years (which we cannot do, so it cannot be seen) may be the only place where we can find the selfishness underlying a selfless desire.
Economists
I don't think that this is a fair characterization of what economists do, unless you meant "some economists." Many (most?) do acknowledge that economics can only provide a positive account of what results we can expect from a particular policy.
I agree that many utilitarians have a tendency to treat their preferences as moral absolutes, but I think the correct way to resolve this is to acknowledge that preferences are just that--preferences--and that there's nothing sacred about them.
I meant some economists,
I meant some economists, e.g. Hanson on Overcoming Bias speaking of "relatively amoral" economists.
To be clear, I'm not saying that there's something problematic about utilitarians treating utilitarianism as objectively correct. I'm saying it's irrelevant--there's no problem to be resolved. However, if one moralist treats his own morality differently than another's--thinks his morality is objectively right while the other's is mere preferences--we do have a problem.
And believing something is objectively right does not commit one to declaring it "sacred." It may be that, objectively, the principle comes with exceptions. Or one may hold the principle loosely, admitting that they may be wrong about it (though it is objective).
No theoretical import either?
The way you describe it, you seem to be implying it has no theoretical import either, because your examples are of people arguing, and it having no impact on their arguments because whichever it is there is one or another move which will allow people to keep believing whatever they want, thus rendering it irrelevant even to theory.
Theory/Practice
If we knew the answer to the question, "What is the ontological status of morality?" then it would not allow one person to keep believing the wrong answer to that. The question "Is morality subjective?" has an answer--I deem this the "theoretical" question. But it has no effect on the "practical" question: "Which morality should we adopt?"
These are stylized definitions of the terms "practical" and "theoretical" that I've designated for my purposes.
Okay then, but...
Here's another question. Are you ruling out an answer to the practical question entirely, or are you just arguing that this is not a fruitful path to it? For, if someone attempts to answer that question (you express this as "which morality should we adopt", though I wonder if you intend this as the same as the question on my mind, namely, "which assertions about morality, and therefore which theories of morality, are correct") then, possibly as a side-effect of answering this question, he may answer the ontological question.
For instance I think people usually know what they're talking about when they make moral claims. If this is true, then what we really need to do is watch these people (as if we were anthropologists) to see how they discover right and wrong. This approach almost inevitably leads to the conclusion that either morality is arbitrary (if people's judgments change drastically from culture to culture) or else morality is not arbitrary but is a biological constant of the human species, and therefore as objectively real as any other biological phenomenon - i.e., real and objective if and only if, and to the extent that, the human species itself is real and objective. And in the meantime we might make some discoveries about the specific content of that biological constant which is morality. So an ontological claim and also a specific claim about content could both be made here.
How would your point apply to this?
1. Are you ruling out an
No, I'm not ruling out a practical answer. Yes, I don't think this is a fruitful path to it.
I believe we intend the same thing.
Yes, if what one means be moral realism would be satisfied by many people simply being geared by evolution or some other design process to perceive some things as moral. But all that means is we've all got the same preferences--in one way, that's subjective (it deals with preferences)--in another, it's objective, as those preferences really do exist. While I think it's fair to use "objective" in this manner, it's hard to see what could be "subjective" by this metric.
Because of this, most people arguing for a sort of moral realism would not be satisfied by simply pointing to regular non-arbitrary preferences in people. Rather, they think morality is external--that even if the human race disappeared tomorrow, there'd still be moral facts that a new race could come by and discover. It is the question of whether such a morality exists that I think is of no practical import.
Splitting just one hair
I do think it might be possible to step at least a short distance beyond the human race in talking about morality. That is, it may be that any species sufficiently similar to the human race will tend to settle on a moral system much like ours. And "sufficiently similar" could be pretty broad. So, in that sense, to split a hair, there might be a morality more universal than humanity itself.
However, in principle I would say that there could well be species sufficiently different from the human species that (a - a practical point) their natural morality, if any, would be vastly unlike ours and (b - a philosophical point) it would be vacuous verging on confused to attack such a species on the grounds that it is amoral or immoral.
I think I agree with all of
I think I agree with all of that.
Constant, is this the most successful conversation we've ever had?
Not ever
Maybe in a while, but I think not ever. Also depends on what counts as success. There may be a few disappointed readers out there.
*raises hand*
How can I expect to learn anything when you guys just agree all the time?
Morality "in common with" animals
Actually, we've come to moral understandings about species that are fairly different from ourselves. So much so that we have laws about how they are to be treated. You know animal cruelty laws. They don't have the full rights we do but they have at least some.
In fact, I have certain moral understandings with my dog. She knows for instance that it is wrong for her to take food from plates that are up on tables, and other surfaces. That is even though she is perfectly capable of getting at them. I can an do leave my dinner on the coffee table and she will not eat it.
In fact, she makes facial expressions where I can tell that she has realized that she has done something wrong. She does have some impulse control problems, being a dog, and situations do arise where it is hard for her to interpret what is OK to eat. Generally anything on the floor is fair game. Certainly anything on her plate.
Normally she will not eat fast food I leave in the car when I am there. I have in fact left fast food in the car in the bag on the divider between the seats. Well one time I left the food in the bag on the floor of the car and had to run into another store for something. When I came out she had chewed into the bag and scarfed down the french fries. I normally let her have a few of those anyhow. Well she didn't touch anything else, so she was following some kind of moral rule in her mind about property rights.
In any case, when I came back to the car she was looking at me like she she was unsure about what she had done. Of course, I said "What did you do. Bad girl." She then looked like she felt bad about it. I have yet to leave a bag on the floor again but I think there is a good chance she will not grab the fries next time around, and even initially she understood that she may have crossed some boundary.
BTW, growing up my family has had other dogs that were just plain stupid and impulsive as far as I could tell. One had jumped right up on the table to scarf down a chocolate cake. Not sure if they were different or if the members of my family at the time (including me) just had trained those dogs wrong.
With my current dog my wife and I were very careful about setting down rule about how to treat the dog. For instance, no positive rewarding of barking, ever. Because of this she never barks to get something. She only barks at intruders and when very excited. Never to say "let me outside".
One might think she was smarter too because she can do about 18 tricks, wereas my prior dogs could only sit, lie down, and shake. I'm not sure however because that too is perhaps because I'm more educated about training the dog now than a reflection on the stupidity of my prior pets.
Animals do however "get morality" to a greater or lesser extend depending on species and individual.
One had jumped right up on
Maybe they were just really, really hungry?
I'm not sure if this is what everyone means by "getting morality." It seems more like regular old behaviorism. (Not that regular old behaviorism is anything to sniff at. It gets a lot done.) The dogs understand that there will be negative or positive consequences for certain kinds of behavior, and act accordingly. But what if they didn't expect to be caught? What if they knew they could safely eat the chocolate cake and no one would ever know who ate it and thus who to punish? Would they still refrain from eating the cake?
Though I suppose this cuts against utilitarianism in favor of deontology. Many people do not consider doing "the right thing" simply because the consequences are in one's favor as morally impressive compared to doing the same thing for the sheer goodness or badness of it.
Aren't there criteria by which we can narrow moral truths?
I think it's obvious that morality isn't entirely subjective. Do you think the moral rule "Brian Macker always gets his way" is truly moral? Such rules have existed in prior societies. Just substitute whatever supreme ruler you like for my name.
Obviously the moral criteria this violates is that it is not reciprocal. So there is at least one objective criteria to establish moral law. There are also others.
On the other hand morality isn't objective in the sense that it applies under all circumstances, to all people, etc. What's moral for you may not be for someone under different circumstances.
Nor does it seem objective in the sense that we can all easily come to agreement or correct our differences against some outside empirical measure.
Every morality I've come across has always had a criteria of "you ought to do what is good for you". Where they differ is on the subject of what is "good for you". Sometimes the morality holds that self destruction is "good for you" under certain circumstances. Some moralities hold say honor as more important "for you" than say physical well being. But in the end they always seem to have this basic logic, do what is good for you. That even applies to "evil moralities" like those practiced by the mafia.
What constitutes "you" in my definition can be broader than your mere body. You is the sum of your being. It is not only your body but what you value, your relationships, your shared kinship, your beliefs, your ideals, etc. Some moralities place different emphasis on differening aspects. Some moralities, for instance, place the religious aspect of self above all else. Thus sacrificing oneself for ones religion is seen as moral.
It seems to me after study that morality does follow certain rules, and that moral systems practiced by humans tend to include "oughts". However the oughts themselves depend on the world view the person has accepted. Often it is in reality an argument over what constitutes reality and not over morality itself. If there is or isn't a god and what that god has or has not communicated certainly has implications on what we ought to do because it has implications on what is "good for us".
If god is going to fry us in hell for eternity for not praying every Wednesday to Moloch with a sacrific of our children then we better get to it, if we in fact value what's good for us. You could argue that such a situation was "not moral" and obeying such a god would not be morality but I would say at that point you are mistaken. If such a god really created the world and that were the rule then in fact sacrificing your children on Wednesday would be moral.
In fact this is exactly how much of the worlds religions have historically worked, and some continue to work this way. The moral double standard of the Hindu believing the untouchable is a lesser being never occurs to a believer. That's just the way it is. Slaughtering an atheist and his family is of no moral consequence to the true believer in Islam if that is what Allah commands. It's just not murder since Allah didn't make it so. In fact, doing so results in a reward in the afterlife so have at it.
When viewed from a meta level like this even selfless acts can be seen to be self interested.
I've been in arguments with the religious and they claim that selfless acts must NOT be motivated by desires to get into heaven to be truly selfless. But this doesn't actually help. It only pushes things to a meta level. Now they are merely giving an additional criteria for "what is good for you".
For example:
You might first misunderstand that to get into heaven you must give to the poor. So you give to the poor because of the selfish reason of getting into heaven. You inform your priest that that is what you are doing and now you are sure to get into heaven. He might tell you "No you must give to the poor out of the good of your heart and not alterior motives to get into heaven". But the minute you follow this you are in fact still trying to get into heaven at the meta level. This time not only altering your physical behavior but your mental attitude to achieve the self interested goal.
I have no doubt that on the inside many people are motivated to protect family and friends "selflessly" in many instances. However, that selflessness is only so with a restricted and not broader sense of self. The restricted sense being only your physical body and a subset of your needs. Things are "selfish" only when they serve this narrower scope and are short sighted.
Isn't your broader self defined by who friends and family are? Wouldn't the death of your own family or friends involve damage to your own needs? They are your friends, and your family, so you don't value them because of some externally imposed agent who's needs and choices they serve.
For instance, I didn't impose on you who your friends are so you saving one of them doesn't benefit me. It may benefit your friend but that is a side effect of your choice to value them. Had you not valued them the way you did you probably wouldn't have bothered. This is easily understood by the fact that you are NOT out there doing things for strangers that you would do for your friends, and family.
You might first
Playing devil's (angel's?) advocate here, perhaps the priest might respond that by initially giving to charity for purely selfish reasons, one develops a positive habit that can eventually become divorced from the initial motivation and done for its own sake. It is at that point that one is accepted into heaven, and the initial charity=heaven offer is really a bait-and-switch, designed and necessary for getting people on the right track to eventually deserve to enter heaven on their own merit.
If there is such a thing as
If there is such a thing as objective morality, then it must in principle be possible to demonstrate what actions are or are not moral.
Conversely, if morality is subjective then it cannot be help that some group will force their moral values upon others that do not share those values.
Not necessarily
Depends on what sort of demonstration is required. As the recent brain-in-a-vat discussion reminds us, if our world is real, it may not be possible to demonstrate that it is real to the satisfaction of every last skeptic. If the reality of the real world itself cannot be demonstrated despite its being real, then what hope does objective morality have, even if it is really objective?
"Every last skeptic" is an
"Every last skeptic" is an unreasonable standard. If morality could be established to such a degree that the only people who disagree with the established moral judgments are on a par with people who deny reality exists in the first place, I think it's fine to say, "ignore them, they're crazy".
I hope you'll agree that there's a meaningful distinction to be made between demanding that people who have different tastes than your act as if they share your tastes and demanding that people who are convinced that 2 + 2 = 5 nonetheless must act according to the rule that 2 + 2 = 4.
I don't think you've fairly
I don't think you've fairly characterized the argument of why subjective morality tends to support (some form of) utilitarianism over rights theories. Well, maybe you've fairly characterized some versions of the argument, but not the strongest ones, and certainly not the one I share. It's not because there is some societal duty to maximize some social welfare function that we should favor utilitarianism. It's because of contractarian concerns, namely:
1. Most people are pretty similar. They want to live happy, healthy, productive, flourishing lives, and they want the same for their friends and family. People tend to empathize with the suffering of others, and take joy in the joy of others. This effect is stronger the closer the target of empathy is to the empathizer; strongest when the empathizer and the empathizee are the same person, slightly less strong when it is an immediate family member or friend, then members of the same community, then members of the same species, then other beings capable of suffering and happiness.
2. In order to convince someone to support Policy X (whether policy is understood as an actual government policy, a social rule, an ethical norm, etc.) it is usually best to put the argument in terms that person already agrees with and understands. Instead of saying, "Policy X is the only policy that respects people's natural rights" without first determining whether the person you are arguing with shares your same conception of natural rights, it is generally wiser to explain why Policy X is more likely than the alternatives to help your interlocutor live happier, healthier, more productive, flourishing life. This skips having to first change their entire moral outlook and simply shows why it is already in their personal interest (which includes both selfish and altruistic reasons) to support the policy.
Notice that this approach is usually how you get someone to change their conception of natural rights. If not through selfish preference satisfaction and the satisfaction of preferences of people that a person empathizes with, how else are you going to convince someone to adopt a new version of natural rights? It's not that natural rights are incorrect; its just that you need additional argument beyond "lies, theft and murder are just wrong, not for any consequential reason, but just because."
This approach requires no resolution of the ultimate ontological normative question. It rests entirely on subjective agreement and a basis for communication between the arguers.
People already believe that
What changed my mind was not a consequentialist argument, or a utilitarian argument, but pitting my own already existing moral intuitions against themselves. Why shouldn't a person keep what he himself had made with materials he had obtained honestly? How can anyone else possibly lay claim to his product? If two people freely agree on something, it's cheating for one of the people to break that agreement and take what the other had not agreed to after the other had invested in their cooperation. And so on. Every major element of classical liberalism already existed in me as strong intuitions. They were not the only intuitions - I also had welfarist and communist and statist intuitions which contradicted them, and I had the statist mental habit of failing to logically extend certain basic moral intuitions critically to the state itself.
Once I made the switch to a classical liberal outlook, then I became deeply offended by the harm ironically being done to humanity as a consequence of the interventions of the do-gooders. But in that order.
No Characterization At All
To be clear, I did not attempt to characterize the argument that "subjective morality tends to support (some form of) utilitarianism over rights theories." Rather, I asserted that there is no such argument. I don't know any such argument, and you haven't produced one.
So far as I can tell, your attempt goes like this: people are generally utilitarians, and thus we should make utilitarian arguments. But, even if the premise is true, of which I'm skeptical, this has nothing to do with whether utilitarianism is objectively true or mere subjective preference. If people believed their utilitarianism to be objectively correct, then it would be just as expedient to make utilitarian arguments as if people believed their utilitarianism to be mere subjective preference.
So far as I can tell, your
No, this is not my argument. My argument is that people have preferences and act to satisfy those preferences. The strongest preferences are usually self-interested, and to a lesser extent, altruistic in an expanding moral circle.
Correct, and I never presumed that the usefulness of a theory as an argumentation tactic or as a way to make policy proves its objective truthfulness. It could very well be the case that my conception of rule consequentialism is both the most persuasive conception of morality to most people, and also provides the policy basis for the best way to organize society, but yet is in some sense fundamentally untrue. But if that is the case, my response is: so what? And that might be the point you are making as well. The objective truthfulness of a moral theory doesn't make any real difference if it doesn't speak to our subjective preferences.
After this comment...
...I can no longer tell what your differences with Scott's views are. What exactly are you guy arguing about? I don't think you're saying that consequentialism is objectively moral. It seems like you're saying you try to convince people of certain policies by appealing to their preferences. If so, I think Scott would agree.
I think the confusion here
I think the confusion here arises from the concept of objective morality itself. Or at least my confusion; the concept is incoherent to me. What would it mean for a moral theory to be both persuasive and useful, but not true? I have no idea. Would it involve God coming down from the heavens to inform us that we got morality wrong? But even God does not define what is moral, if you accept the Euthyphro dilemma.
So I certainly agree with at least one interpretation of Scott's argument: the objectivity of morality does not make a bit of differences to anything, since in my view this definition of objective morality is incoherent.
But the thing is, there are other ways to define objective morality. One way is to simply define it as whatever moral theory happens to be best for attaining widely shared human goals. (There can presumable be only one such theory, and we are either right or wrong about whether we have discovered it.) Other people disagree with this definition and instead think that this would be a subjective morality. As long as the argument remains on this level, it doesn't really matter to me what people call it. But if the argument remains on this level, then the (only) way to determine the "true" moral theory is to first determine which moral theory helps us attain our widely shared goals.
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