I dunno, I'm somewhat attracted to moral abolitionism and I will sometimes make an effort to phrase things explicitly in terms of, e.g. something being socially beneficial or me approving of something. But I think the main reason I don't really commit to it is that a lot of the time I'm going to be interacting with people who've probably never even heard the word "metaethics" and it just makes things easier to simply use moral language in the standard way. Also, when I want to strongly praise or condemn something, it's kind of hard to come up with an alternative that feels as satisfying as using a standard moral term. So, yeah, a world without standard moral discourse sounds like an interesting idea, but I don't feel all that much pressure to help bring it about. 🤷♀
I feel like it's really weird to see you outside your typical little room. I personally liked to believe that you only existed in that little room with the books.
I'm currently writing this comment from that little room, so since there's no such thing as personal identity over time, I do in fact only exist in that room.
I think the self-refutation argument works in this case for hard moral abolitionism. So I'll put it like this: There's soft and hard moral abolitionism. Soft version just wants to get rid of the belief in objective morality. The hard version wants to even abolish the belief in subjective morality. Here, I'm talking about hard abolitionism specifically. Now, assuming antirealism about morality, the hard abolitionist believes in the subjective moral truth that all morality should be abolished. That includes the abolitionist's moral belief that all morality should be abolished. So far there's no problem, because you can just say that abolitionism will be the last morality to be abolished once all other moralities have already been abolished. But suppose it gets to that point where all moralities have been abolished - except for abolitionism. Well, the next morality to be abolished is abolitionism. What now? Well, now moral abolitionism is no longer true and people may start cultivating new moral beliefs. All this trouble for nothing. Assuming realism about morality; that it's a fact that morality should be abolished; the person subscribing to abolitionism is committed to a contradiction that morality both should and should not be abolished.
Just a wee note to say it was cool to see/hear two of my fave philosophy RU-vidrs - you and Richard Brown get together and chew the cud. I dip into Browns channel often due to my interest in all things "hard problem" and science related
Interesting video, I just had some thoughts in response to the video. Regarding the point about it being difficult to define the boundaries of the moral domain I’m not sure I understand how this would be a problem for abolitionists; presuming we were getting to abolitionism from error theory. If I understand correctly, one main reason error theorists deny the existence of objective moral values is because, if they were to exist, they would be objectively prescriptive i.e. that they would give us categorical reasons for action, and these properties would be too queer to exist (Mackie’s ‘Argument from Queerness’). So the error theorist would believe that morality, if it were real, would necessarily involve categorical reasons for action. So even if we can’t define moral discourse in terms of its content, we could say that what makes a discourse 'moral', regardless of its specific content, is that it makes claims about the attitudes and behaviours people ought to adopt independently of their specific aims and desires. So I suppose an abolitionist could argue that, given (most?) people’s actual aims and desires, the kind of discourse that makes these kinds of categorical demands on people is 'bad' i.e. contrary to people's aims and desires e.g. because it ends up being a tool for the powerful to control the masses, it makes people more closed-minded, and/or it increases conflict. Also, I would suspect someone who thought we would all be better off without moral discourse would favour an approach of more gradual persuasion/encouragement by showing people how abolitionism would help them better achieve their aims and desires over adopting the attitude that we all ‘must’ abolish moral discourse right now (presuming they thought abolition was a realistic goal at all). Anyway I hope that made sense. Glad you’re ok Kane, hope you recover fully soon!
The kind of abolitionism I'd support is the abandonment of normative discourse in which one side or another asserts something as a desirable without admitting or outright denying the desire. I.E discourse like "Free speech absolutism may not be pleasant in practice, but its the morally superior position". The person saying this in fact, just wants absolute free usage of speech to be an option, and is ok with the consequences. However instead of saying this, they say the prior, morally loaded phrase, seemingly to obfuscate what they want or that the discourse is just normal deliberation. If they just said what they wanted, we could have a discussion and come to an agreement, but the moral assumptions in the background make the discourse tenuous, insofar as the realist here is alleging that not only does their opponent want something they don't, but that they're defective in wanting it.
I think this view is the best for error theory because: Should and shouldn't do it only works if you have a desire to achieve it, desire is the only motivation. Saying: "You shouldn't kill animals because is wrong" Only will work if it is a condition to get what a person wants. If you know it is a condition to get it, what you only need to say is: :You shouldn't kill animals or you won't get "that". If you don't know what a person wants, find out. If you can't find out, saying things arr wrong or right will probably not get you in anywhere. In this sense abolish morality means: " Only instrumental talk works, only instrumental talk is needed. "
What do we mean by "works"? I assume that whether it works depends on what my goals are, but there are lots of things I might be doing when I engage in moral discourse. In any case, it might be that moral discourse provides a simple framework for expressing desires and negotiating conflicts. If so, moral talk can be a kind of instrumental talk in your sense.
@@KaneB works to convince someone to do what you want then to do. You give a person a instrumental reason to get what they want, so they do what you want. You want a little girl to shut up. So you know she is afraid of Peter Singer. So you tell her that Peter Singer will come if she don't shut up, she believes in you, so she shut up. Saying talking too much is wrong would probably not work, Peter Singer is Scarier that the word "wrong" to her.
Depends on what you mean by moral nihilism. But I have lots of videos on antirealism in my metaethics series: ru-vid.com/group/PLXKKIUdnOESH7mWijTiv4tTFAcQnEkFDJ
I could smell perfectly fine, but I lost the ability to taste sour and most of my ability to taste sweet things. It was bizarre. The oranges I ate tasted mildly salty.
Next Kane B video: “Hello everyone, I’m Kane b with another video and today I’m going to explain why I hate the absolute living hell out of moral realism and want moral realists to be unemployed”
@@provolone5336 I did a video with Kane B and have started making the rounds elsewhere. My general stance is that there are no good arguments for moral realism, and that its popularity among professional philosophers is more an indication that there is something seriously wrong with the methods used in philosophy than it is an indication that moral realism is at all plausible. I see the popularity of moral realism as a symptom of a deeper indication of a systematic failure of philosophy to reflect on, revise, and develop good methods for arriving at conclusions, in part due to inadequate engagement with the sciences. The 2020 PhilPapers survey found that 62% of philosophers endorsed moral realism. To get a sense of my attitude towards this, imagine if 62% of biologists thought Bigfoot was real, or 62% of astronomers thought astrology was real and they spent most of their time defending horoscopes.
That's why Scientism always comes back to Metaphysics: It's a good source fighting reality, even denying that. And who believes in original sin nowadays when the reason is almost always money?!
A real moral abolitionist wouldn’t be policing people’s language for moral claims they’d be engaging in subversive actions in the real world maybe even ones that make them uncomfortable and using whatever moral language was convenient for them to justify themselves if they were really motivated to live their own beliefs
Anyone who committed an evil act can just say they didn't choose to be born evil, etc. Evil we can say at least in the utilitarian sense that the world would be better for us if they didn't exist. The only answer to morality is some kind of transcendent possibility: Some people would say regardless of what happens that everything is somehow for a good reason, making spiritual arguments etc. This is close but not in the right context. Because obviously if I choose to have a child and raise it poorly, the reason the child suffers is entirely my choice and has nothing to do with preestablished harmony (yes I am casually reference Leibniz). The only guarantee is that any choice has an equivalence, like physics, that the situation may be as bad as possible but at least the prices and costs are not lost in the transcendent scheme - the equation is balanced, not in a sense of justice but purely like conservation of energy. If we all ask ourselves honestly we can all see why we were born on earth and not in a more ideal place, in hindsight looking at our flaws. What I have been getting at as a philosopher is that old question; why create imperfection/suffering if you could just not? Well here I give frustratingly simple examples: If you have infinite memory then that memory has no meaning. Or something like Gödel's incompleteness. Or even more simple that, an infinite set can only exist ultimately as a collection of finite elements. This kind of meaningless answer is just a frustration humanity has to get over like getting over a tantrum. As much as logicians hate this appropriation it is true. That morality itself is essentially dialetheia. The question for all philosophers is simply: What do you mean by 'abolish' exactly? And they will always come to some kind of psuedo-paradox very quickly.
15:03 "Abolitionists weigh the costs and benefits from a social point of view. but ar you not now just engaging in moral reasoning? It looks like someone could just say 'that is moral reasoning'" I think you (or the voice you are arguing from) might forget that abolitionists are error theorists, hence they believe (if we take Olson's version of error theory) that moral discourse is committed to irreducibly normative reasons for actions. Saying that something is beneficial from a social point of view doesn't make the abolitionist committed to these reasons being irreducibly normative. Abolitionists only need to abolish morality (or substitute moral language for language that does not carry irreducible normative force) in so far as it is committed to irreducible normative reasons for action. Prudential reasons for action is not (according to the error theorist) moral reasons for action, because prudential reasons for action are not irreducible. Of course people can say that morality is not committed to irreducible reasons for action and that giving a prudential reason (X is socially beneficial) is just what engaging in moral reasoning is about, but this is an objection to error theory, not to abolitionism.
First, abolitionists need not be error theorists. Although abolitionism is most often discussed in the context of error theory, it's compatible with a range of metaethical views, including realism. Second, error theorists need not identify the error as irreducible normative reasons. There are other ways of getting to the conclusion that all moral judgements are false. (Cowie's first-order incoherence argument doesn't appeal to irreducible normativity. Even Joyce, who has appealed to categorical normativity as the error of morality, has also said that this is just one way of cashing out the "practical authority" of moral judgements, which is where the problem lies.) Anyway, I'd say that if abolitionism just amounts to the claim that we should abolish "irreducible normativity", but we can carry on engaging in discourse that would otherwise be classed as moral, this is a very weak form of abolitionism. Indeed, doesn't this just collapse the distinction between abolitionism and substitutionism? The substitutionist keeps moral language but uses it to express noncognitive states rather than beliefs. So they're abolishing irreducible normativity, but all the moral terminology remains in use.
@@KaneB Regarding the distinction between abolitionism and substitutionism, it got me thinking about something that François Jaquet brought up. There has been offered many solutions that propose to keep moral discourse intact, while substituting the normative content so as to avoid it being moral, such as Köhler & Ridge's revolutionary expressivism (2014), Svaboda's Revisionary expressivism (2015), Lutz's substitutionism (2014), Kalf/Mackie's surrogat(ism) (2018), Lenman/Blackburn's (revolutionary) schmoralising (2013), etc. François Jaquet (2020) argues that substitutionist solutions such as these are "merely variations of abolitionism", because "there is nothing moral about the attitudes these philosophers say we should replace our moral beliefs with". If we accept Jaquet's argument that substitutionism is a form of abolitionism, then we have either substitutionist abolitionists that propose to only change the normative content of moral discourse, and we have the eliminativist abolitionists, who claim that we should substitute moral discourse in its entirety. This side "recommends that we ... replace it with some motivational aids that allow us to acknowledge and deal with things as they are.” (Garner: 2007: 504). So, for instance, they think we should substitute the discourse about moral rights with discourses about "legal rights, civil rights, conventional rights, and countless entitlements and liberties we regularly give to and demand from one another" (503). But I agree with you that the boundaries of moral discourse are vague. A difficulty is what the abolitionist should do about thick evaluative terms such as "generous" or "sadistic" or "vulgar". It seems that the abolitionist can only opt for eliminating moral discourse in regards to thin moral terms, while needing to substitute the moral content of thick terms, but then the discussion (about the boundaries of moral language) ends up being about thick/thin. It seems an abolitionist needs to specify their position on a great many things before they can give an answer to what is included in their abolishment, but I think this only matters when trying to give a general view of what abolitionists are wanting to abolish, it depends on the positions of the specific abolitionist.
Possibly. There is some evidence that there are societies that do not have moral concepts, but I find it really difficult to evaluate such claims because it depends on what you take *moral* concepts to be. This is the worry I have about moral abolitionism - what we mean by "moral" discourse is vague. Berniunas's article "Mongolian yos surtakhuun and WEIRD morality" and Wierzbicka's "Moral sense" are worth checking out (both are open access online).
Yes, it would appear there are. See here: Berniūnas, R. (2020). Mongolian yos surtakhuun and WEIRD “morality”. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 4(1), 59-71. I suspect we'll see few if any remaining societies that no longer have moral concepts due to the influence of European colonialism and the spread of Christianity and missionaries around the world. However, I expect there is good reason to doubt that moral judgments are a natural kind, that humans have an evolved predisposition to think in distinctively "moral" terms (whatever that means), or that there is any principled way to distinguish moral from nonmoral norms that will ever command anything like a consensus among philosophers. The notion of "morality" as a normative domain may be culturally idiosyncratic, and present only in some cultures but not others. There's a few papers on this, such as Edouard Machery's paper on morality as an historical invention, Stich's paper on the moral domain, Mallon and Machery's chapter on the evolution of morality, and Wheatley and Sinnott-Armstrong's two papers on the disunity of morality. I can provide references if interested. My area of research is in how ordinary people think about morality, so this stuff is kinda my thing.
@@KaneB Yea, that's a fair assessment. It's tough to say whether societies "have moral concepts." They may not lexicalize moral concepts in a way that fits neatly with the way we employ the terms and concepts, but depending on what we consider moral judgments to be, we might still say that they're engaged in "moral judgment." I don't buy it though. Something about the way morality operates in the contexts I'm familiar with, it doesn't strike me as capable of successful analysis. It just seems sui generis, and that lends itself, to me, to the suggestion that it is a kind of linguistic tag, or label, for which there is no principled means of application. It's a kind of culturally-acquired linguistic and conceptual tag that lacks much in the way of substantive content. Once one considers the broader philosophical issues surrounding giving a satisfactory account of what "morality" even is supposed to be, the prospects for moral naturalism strike me as incredibly grim, but far from making me think non-naturalism is the way to go, it makes me think that a sort of quietism about the very concept of morality may be the proper step to take. I see "morality" as a normative domain in much the same way one might see the fictional non-moral normative systems of made up alien species, i.e., schmoral systems and the like.
@@lanceindependent I tend to agree with you, morality is a slippery concept. I think it's partly due to the fact that we tend to equivocate between different meanings of morality. There's the 'moral judgment' (a psychological state), and there's the 'moral statement/discourse' (a linguistic tag), and then there's the 'moral domain' itself (the set of norms we distinguish from non-moral norms as containing moral values). The problem is we are able to moralize any value. So the difference between moral and non-moral norms becomes blurred.
@@lanceindependent See also: Taylor Davis at Purdue university. He's done studies on the moral concept across religions and found that, "Mormon and Muslim participants moralized their religious norms, while Jewish participants did not. Hindu participants in our sample did not seem to make a moral/non-moral distinction of the same kind. These results suggest a profound relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the scope of the moral domain." Religious Affiliation and Conceptions of the Moral Domain (2021)
What if you say i dont like moral discourse because its far from truth or does that fall back into what is not true is immoral? i personally see my self as a kind of moral abolitionist, but in the sense when people talk to me about morality i say to them i dont like to use the term morality :P
Sure, that's fine, but is this a philosophical position? You're just saying you dislike moral discourse. I dislike mustard; am I a mustard abolitionist?
Aren't we basically inherently motivated by certain values? Isn't that a nascent morality in itself, though not propositional? When one is starving, his values are (usually) that little or nothing matters more than getting some sustenance. What you do in life betrays your preference for what you thought you ought to do, whether it was instinct or carefully and deliberately planned. As for realism, I suppose we could look at how much those behaviors have in common, compare across a variety of experiences and situations and see if we find good reasons for generalizing.
Does “moral abolitionism” mean something like “nobody ever holds anyone accountable for anything”? All moral theories seem to share that they are about whether, when, and how we hold each other to account. “Moral abolitionism” can’t mean “nobody ever maximizes utility”, because that doesn’t abolish Kantianism. The term can mean what I said regarding accountability, tho, because (I think) all and only moral theories explain whether, when, and how to hold each other to account.
Most moral abolitionists are happy for people to criticize behaviour, to encourage particular policies and discourage others, to negotiate rules, to punish and reward, etc. If this sounds like moral reasoning... well, this is exactly the problem I was pointing to when I said that the boundaries of morality are vague.
@@KaneB Moral abolition seems to me like the view that nobody should be held accountable for anything ever. That’s silly, tho. Although the boundaries may be vague, surely you agree that nearly all moral reasoning is about whether, when, and how to hold people accountable?
@@suzettedarrow8739 That's an important aspect of it, sure. I can think of plenty of cases where these arguably come apart though. Consequentialists often respond to objections to their views by distinguishing actions that are morally wrong from actions that it is appropriate to blame or punish. Conversely, I might blame or punish someone for purely self-interested reasons.
@@KaneB That’s how consequentialists describe their views. Do you think they are right that there is a difference between moral responsibility & propriety for blame/praise? I do not. We are morally responsible for all & only the actions for which it is appropriate to blame or praise. So much the worse for those consequentialists, I guess.
@@suzettedarrow8739 That's a different distinction. What I was saying was that consequentialists might judge that an action is morally wrong, but that it is not appropriate to blame or punish somebody for it. Do I agree with them on that? Sure, I guess. It seems an intuitive distinction to me. I don't really have a strong opinion on this kind of thing, though. I think we can draw the boundaries of the moral domain in different places -- if we want to say that, by definition, moral discourse involves "holding people to account" or whatever else, that's fine. But then this definition isn't going to track a lot of actual moral discourse. So what's the point of it? (This question isn't intended to sound dismissive. There are lots of situations in which it's useful to propose precise alternatives to the vague concepts of ordinary language.)
You use the terms, should, ought, good, etc a lot in this video, I know these can be interpreted as good for me or something like that, but do you think you could have made this video with only appealing to 'personal values' aka good for me
I dunno, you could probably translate it into that language if you really wanted. But isn't it a lot easier to just say "should", "ought", "good", etc.? I don't think that anything I say in this video commits me to anything I don't want to be committed to (as an antirealist).
@@davidzuilhof2272 I guess it's just that the famous ones are so crappy -- e.g. the self-refutation argument against relativism about truth and the self-refutation argument against eliminative materialism. I think a lot of these arguments are either obviously question-begging (the anti-relativist argument is an example of this) or they ignore the possibility of conceptual change (the anti-eliminativist argument is an example of this).
I'm probably more sympathetic to abolitionism. If someone just appeals to wrongness then that doesn't help to resolve a disagreement. If you have to ask "why?" a couple times, then just skip to that part. Or there isn't a reason, and then there's nothing to talk about. Something else I've been thinking about is religious discourse, like: I'm not worried about getting sick because it's in God's hands. It's a prepackaged, simplified way to talk about things. that's how I view moral discourse. it only seems indispensable because everyone does it, but it really isn't.
I agree that moral discourse is not indispensable. We could do away with it, if we really wanted. In the end, I just don't think the benefits are worth the effort. I also agree that moral discourse is not particularly useful for resolving disagreements... or at least, it's not when all parties to the debate are exhibiting what I would consider intellectual virtues, which is rarely the case. In practice, a refusal to make certain moral judgments will, in many debates, be rhetorically ineffective. For example, if you are debating the death penalty, you may be expected to pass moral judgments on the murderer, and people will just dismiss what you say if you don't. Though this is something we should resist, so I'm not inclined to hold this against the abolitionist.
What are your thoughts on substitutionism? Also, do you think moral antirealists maybe motivated to adopt abolishinsm just because they think moral judgements are false, and leave the burden of proving other alternative approaches onto others? That would seem to avoid the problem you mention of promoting abolishinsm because this would avoid conflicts etc! Or does this approach still relate to the is-ought gap? I'm glad your covid isn't so bad. Your funny story reminds me of Newton stinging his eyes with needles out of curiosity to see what happens :D
I think people already use morality to express noncognitive states, so there's no need to make any substitution. All we need to do is remove false beliefs about morality, and we can do that with the usual arguments against realism. The view that moral judgements are false doesn't in itself get you abolitionism. Anyway, abolitionism is a pretty unpopular view even among antirealists.
@@KaneB @Kane B I'm curious..in your video "moral error theory..now what?", you mentioned four approaches; abolishinsm, conservationism, fictionalism and substitutionism. You seem you're making the suggestion of removing false beliefs and keep using moral language as expression of sentiment..this is a different approach, isn't it? I don't see it fitting any of the previous ones.
@@darcyone6291 It's not really different. A substitutionist will say that we should use moral discourse to express noncognitive states like sentiments. I'm saying that it's already used that way. That's one among many ways that people already use moral discourse.
@@KaneB I see. Personally, it's actually the way I do intend to use moral language. I also view morality as something to use for my own psychological growth, as a means to sort of arrange my priorities and relate my actions to my values, so I would say something like "I do such and such because it aligns best with my personal values" without making claims about the act being "correct" (which seems like the 'self-censorship' you were objecting to, but I don't really mind making myself clear in that sense, it seems to me to be a more consistent way to expresse myself regarding my antirealist position). Here comes a point I'm interested to ask you about. It seems that this approach results in a completely individualistic system of morality, one that wouldn't function to organise the relationships between people in society, which sounds somewhat paradoxical to the whole point of morality anyway! Personally I don't find this problematic because 1) as an antirealist, I don't give much credit to the "point of morality" and 2) I don't care that much about society (I mean, people can figure out how they want to arrange their inter-personal relationships right? :D ). Of course I am not saying that I am not affected by how affairs are organised in my society, but unless it's directly imposed on me, I don't really care that much, as I try to arrange my life without appealing to societal norms. Anyway, I was just saying I'm interested to hear your opinion on that seemingly Paradoxical result. I'm not a native English speaker, but I hope I was able to express myself clear enough.
@@darcyone6291 When we make moral arguments, we have to hope that our interlocutors share similar values to us; if they do not, there may be no way of getting through to them. But the moral realist is in exactly the same position. If somebody has completely different beliefs about what the objective moral facts are -- if somebody takes it to be an objective fact that we ought to promote violence and suffering, that we ought to arbitrarily discriminate, that we ought to exploit the weak, etc., we're not going to make any progress with them by insisting that actually, it is *our* norms that are objectively correct. Both realists and antirealists just have to be thankful that, as a matter of contingent fact, there are basic sentiments that are commonly enough shared to support peaceful, cooperative norms. So I don't think the antirealist is really committed to a purely "individualistic" way of thinking about morality... or at least, if she is, this is a problem that the realist faces as well.
Imagine this scenario : 1. All humanity has gone except for one baby. This baby is kept in a special machine. The machine has two modes, and you, at the level of thought, decide which mode it is to be put on. 2. In the first mode, this baby could be kept on a life support, for years on end, but only so the baby could be tortured in the most painful ways. The baby will never be allowed to develop any of its faculties. She/he will know only pain. The baby will be chronically tortured, and then, as a climax, brutally killed. 3. Or in the second mode, the baby could be, as painlessly and comfortably as possible, be allowed to die naturally. 4. This example has no consequence in terms of virtue ethics, nor utilitarianism. It's what might be called a 'pure example' of moral commitment, an example of how we are orientated to human welfare, in the most abstract. If you think option 3 is OBJECTIVELY better than option 2, you are a moral realist. If you think neither is better objectively, you are a moral nihilist. If you think option 2 is objectively better, you are something like, to coin a phrase, a moral-satanist. But if you are a moral nihilist, you cannot say that being a moral-satanist is in any way morally wrong. Moral-nihilism allows for moral-satanism. Moral-satanism is a perfectly valid subset of the wider set of moral nihilism. Moral Realistic Conclusion : If you have spent years studying philosophy, 'the love of wisdom', and have only done so to reach the conclusion that it doesn't matter whether babies are tortured or not, you have completely wasted your intellectual-life, and the average supermarket shelf-stacker is wiser than you.
Although a moral nihilist might object to a moral-satanist saying it is OBJECTIVELY better that the baby is tortured, on the grounds that there is no objective morality (in the moral nihilist's opinion). Yet, the moral-nihilist still could not morally condemn either the moral-satanist's skewed moral positions, nor lack of logic, for that matter.
>> But if you are a moral nihilist, you cannot say that being a moral-satanist is in any way morally wrong Sure you can. You just wouldn't say that it's objectively morally wrong. Nothing stops antirealists from making moral judgments.
@@KaneB What is the worth of a moral condemnation, that lacks objective value? If such a condemnation speaks only of our own sentiment/taste/opinion, it is really saying nothing of the thing it seeks to condemn, and therefore is not condemning. It is Performative Self-Contradiction. It is 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'.
@@-ring-a-ding-my-dingaling Well, it means that there can be real moral condemnation or moral-praise, as things are really objectively-wrong or objectively-praiseworthy - which is a good thing as that is what constitutes a greater part of human existence. Moral Reality is the most real of all realities, as everyone - from small children arguing over using a pencil sharpener, to octogenarians arguing over community safety - testifies.
