Hi, Kane! First of all, i'd like to say that you're doing a very god job with this channel. I discovered you just a few weeks ago and i'm learning a lot with your videos. Second: do you have any interest in the relation between faith and epistemology? I found a philosopher called Lara Buchak who makes a very good case for the faith as a rational method. What's your take on it? (** I apologize for my bad grammar. I'm not a native speaker)
I find the "widespread moral disagreement" claim to be overstated. While there is widespread disagreement, relative to the past there ALSO seems to be widespread convergance on a whole range of issues AND this state of affairs (both the persistent disagreement and convergence) looks analogous to the distribution/process of belief and progress in other epistemic areas, like the natural sciences and math.
>> While there is widespread disagreement Well, I'm not sure why you find the claim that there is widespread moral disagreement to be overstated, then! I don't think convergence in itself helps with this problem. The antirealist will challenge you to explain why it took so long, and why it was necessary in the first place. Why did people in the past go so far off-track?
Imagine two societies with preindustrial technology. Each develops on the opposite side of an impenetrable mountain. Think of each society's language, culture, food, clothing style, customs, beliefs...everything that society what it is. Time moves on, and a great earthquake levels the mountain, leaving the ground between the two societies wide open. The societies are now able to interact. A thousand years go by. What would the language, culture, food, clothing style, customs, belief be like? More similar, or less similar? I suspect, across all these dimensions, they will have become more similar. They'll borrow words, and customs, and recipes. By this point, the societies may have merged so thoroughly that you couldn't tell them apart. We live in a modern world where geographic and linguistic barriers have been minimized or eliminated by cultural osmosis. People all over the world drink coke, wear jeans, watch many of the same TV shows, use technology made by the same companies, practice the same religion, and so on. There is broad convergence across so many cultural and social dimensions, and all of it can be readily explained by all the cascading and multifaceted consequences of the mere fact that people are interacting with one another. We have no need to consider "moral facts" as some kind of serious hypothesis for why people would converge on their moral standards. We have all the mundane forces of the social sciences to account for moral convergence. I am genuinely puzzled that realists would reach for the notion that there's some special type of fact driving convergence in moral standards without first considering whether we can get the job done with mundane social scientific explanations. I'll take the parsimony of employing the tools both realists and antirealists accept over the extravagance of moral facts as an explanation. Moral realism as an explanation for convergence is the contemporary equivalent of phlogiston.
@@KaneB ha yes. I better rendering would be: "there is widespread disagreement, especially at the individual level, but a lot less than the claim (or how it is put) suggests, especially as a ratio of agreement to disagreement and when you take a longer/more general view of things" I suspect people in the past were so far off-track for analogous reasons regarding why they were also so off track about cosmology. Because what made some theories/claims true and others not was far more complicated than was intuitively apparent and an extending process of deliberation was required to sort the good from the bad.
@@lanceindependent A lot of the "no progress/no justified convergence" positions sound analogous to pessimistic induction arguments re: science. These only work if you regard the terrain that the various claims and theories that are being navigated as essentially arbitrary and the process of navigation as static. Neither of these is the case, either in science or in our processes of moral deliberation or the content of moral ideas themselves
@@CasualPhilosophy Nothing I'm suggesting alludes to pessimistic induction. As far as other responses to convergence: which ones are you referring to? //These only work if you regard the terrain that the various claims and theories that are being navigated as essentially arbitrary and the process of navigation as static// I don't think convergence has been arbitrary. It sounds like you're responding to something I didn't say and don't think. There simply are no observations about how society has changed that require us to posit the existence of stance-independent moral facts to account for why people would become more similar over time. People have converged on similar culinary practices. I don't think that convergence in culinary practices is completely arbitrary. Some of it may be. But some of it is probably just discovering better and worse ways to make food relative to standard human preferences. Convergence in culinary practices isn't best explained by gastronomic realism though. It is best explained by a combination of cultural convergence, increased knowledge of methods that optimize for conventional human taste preferences, and so on. Before positing special types of facts or phenomena for explaining "Why would humans come to agree about things over time," we should first appeal to whatever resources are already available to us, so as to not "multiply entities beyond necessity," as it were. We have centuries of colonialism, missionary work, cultural osmosis, convergence in religious belief (Christianity and Islam have spread all over the world), decades of overlapping exposure to media and centuries of exposure to the same literature. As my allegory of the two societies separated by a mountain illustrates, when you remove barriers and people are exposed to the same food, music, media, culture, religion, ideas, language, and so on , they will become more similar to one another for completely mundane reasons. We don't need to propose gastronomic realism to explain why McDonalds is so popular, or why people all over the world love French Fries and pasta. Why would we need to posit moral facts to explain convergence? Get humans to cook and eat together for a long time, and it's no surprise when they come to share more similar food preferences than when you started. Get them to speak the same language, eliminate cultural barriers, give them similar socioeconomic backgrounds and a shared culture, and they'll eat even more similar foods. Yet this is not best explained by gastronomic realism. When you peel away all the direct and indirect factors that cause people to differ, they become more similar. Just the same, get humans with different values you live separate from one another to interact with one another for a much longer time, to have kids together, speak the same language, and talk to one another a whole lot, and they'll start to become more similar. Get them to adopt the same religions, myths, narratives, stories, entertainment, clothing, food, and other factors, and they'll become even more similar. And as the incentives to brutalize and harm one another become less and less attractive, and as it becomes easier and easier to tolerate others, and as life becomes less harsh and easier, there should be no surprise if your attitudes about how others should be treated start to converge not in a random direction, but in the direction of adopting values consistent with the conditions in which you live.
@@KaneB Hey Kane. I'm wondering if you've thought of doing videos on normative ethics. I'm interested in the difference and disagreement between the various views.
I too am well up for incest club ;) While I think Haidt's study shows exactly what he says it does (I'm a fan), I think the story exposes what most thought experiments we can conjure do: the conclusion seems absurd or unintuitive, but only because the example is absurd. My emotional or intuitive response to the story is that no, there's nothing morally wrong, but I still feel a bit grossed out. I've evolved that way, be that deep in some brain-programming or merely socially influenced (with biology working its magic in the background of course). The feeling of moral disgust that's guiding the participants' judgements is a neurobiological function repurposed from the gene-protecting lizard-brain response to faeces, rotten food and other sources of infection. As a modern human who's developed a passing interest in moral philosophy, I immediately engage a bit of 'System 1' so I can recognise the feeling of moral disgust and separate that from how the story relates to my framework of beliefs about morality, which happen to be basically utilitarian. I've got two competing responses, and for me in this case System 1 wins. Being the kind of guy who's pretty easy-going about incest, I don't get System 1 on the case of justifying System 2's intuition as the participants in the study did. Now for Mark and Julie, the story says that they just don't have the circuits to feel the moral disgust - but this is just absurd, it's extremely unlikely that two people would share the exactly same neural deficit in this way (maybe more likely in two siblings though I suppose). So yeah, the story throws up a counterintuitive conclusion, but that's fine, our consensus morality that holds society together is not about to collapse: the example is absurd and we don't have to confront it in our lives. Although I'd be down with it if we did ;)
I don't think everyone in 'western culture' hold that slavery is wrong. I have seen Christians argue that slavery is not actually wrong in some circumstances. While I don't buy that 'western culture' is Christian and only Christian, it would seem odd to exclude them as part of "western culture". Personally I am unsure if slavery is wrong in all cases, I don't think we currently live in a time where slavery should be legal though. I am very certain that I am part of my culture, which could vaguely be referred to as "western culture". I use quotes around western culture as I find this idea of culture being this one thing kind of odd, it seems to me that culture is multiple and conflicted. I don't think when I refer to 'western culture' that I am actually referring to Western Culture singular but this vague collection of cultures plural that have some historical connection from their intellectual and geographic locations. This kind of argument seems to be taking culture as a singular which I find hard to wrap my head around. This does not seem like a new argument, this seems like something that has been argued against in "the Challenge of Cultural Relativism" by James Rachels. I could be missing the distinction here. The argument presented seems to hold that the moral realist is committed to the idea at this point in time we have the Truth with a capital T, I don't really see why that would be the case. Other thing that we believe we have access to Truth of, we are happy to accept that our current understanding is wrong in some way but we just don't know which parts. It seems odd that morality has this special requirement that all people in all times have perfect access to the Truth of the matter. Perhaps I am missing something, I think I need to watch this video again and write down some notes.
>> This kind of argument seems to be taking culture as a singular I don't think it does. This is just a simplifying assumption made for ease of presenting the argument. If it turns out that there is significant moral variation even within our culture -- and, like you, I suspect that this is the case -- this only makes the challenge more powerful, since it will make it more difficult to identify relevant differences between ourselves and those with radically different moral commitments. >> This does not seem like a new argument There are lots of different arguments from moral disagreement. I do think that this raises a slightly different challenge to some of the standard ones. I talk about some other ones in this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0Gxtj65Vyew.html >> The argument presented seems to hold that the moral realist is committed to the idea at this point in time we have the Truth with a capital T, No. It takes the moral realist to be committed to the idea that our moral beliefs are approximately true, that we are significantly off-track. We haven't made significant errors in our basic moral commitments.
Make a vid on whether financial abortion should be legalised. There should be two cases for financial abortion first that a featus is a person from conception.second the featus beacomes a person after 24 weeks.in which case should it be legalised and in which it should not
Ok you didn't like the previous argument. Well try this one on for size. Why would a cultural practice that we find immoral, which continues to the present, persist even though the "truth" of the matter has been shown buy "us"? One strong driver of behaviour is group cohesion. (Sorry for the assertion but I contend that that is well grounded). Innate morality, as driven by evolutionary factors, would put a strong emphasis on the maintenance of a strong group dynamic. It's obviously no stretch of the imagination that it could include FGM etc etc. In face, the gladiatorial games mentioned in the video we're explicitly performed for this purpose, 'bread and circuses'. The realist need only to appeal to the 'fact' that the moral truth of group cohesion (or something similar) is being realised to a certain degree just that other moral truths are falling by the wayside because of it. Error born of ignorance and shortsightedness, two very human traits indeed For the anti-realist, this argument can be easily countered by an appeal to moral intuitions, whatever they may be, that come about through natural means, as discussed before, and that the extent cultures can be manipulated by factors like propaganda or class interests or religion etc etc is evident in the range of moral positions we see in the world. Whether or not we are acting morally or not depends on our values, culture of philosophy/rational discussion etc. Unfortunately, in the anti realist camp, talking about innate moral intuitions is verboten.... So we are ideologically trapped. Thanks for reading
>> Ok you didn't like the previous argument Lol, I didn't see your previous argument until now. I only just got out of bed. I assume that group cohesion is a significant factor in people's moral beliefs, but presumably this factor is also at work today? So I expect that Smyth would say that this falls to the symmetry problem. We haven't identified a difference between ourselves and others.
@@KaneB Glad you're well rested! As for Smyth, why is symmetry a problem? Yes of course the same factors are at play today as yesterday. An individual can find what he's doing immoral but within the confines of an institutional structure is either unable or unwilling to do anything, or unknowingly participating. No contradiction, no issues with symmetry. As for the silly question "why do those guys do bad things over there", surely we should ask ourselves "why do we do bad things over here?" Not only is that the more moral question (of course you worry about your own actions before others) but it may also answer the supposed problem of symmetry. There are differences in what cultures practice, for instance us, the richest most powerful (and according to Smyth, most moral) countries are accelerating the environmental destruction of the planet. Whereas 'them', for instance tribal Amazon communities, the poorest (least moral) people, who don't treat women the way we do, some even engage in cannibalism, they're on the frontlines trying to prevent us from destroying the planet. Diametrically opposed values. I leave it to the audience to determine what these facts mean for error theory and moral realism/anti-realism.
Obviously the moral realist should mainly appeal to option 3) distorting factors and then should just deny the claim that the symmetry objection obtains. There are numerous reasons to think that nowadays we are influenced significantly less by those distorting factors - one of the main reasons for this is that we have improved our education system, which teaches students how to think critically and evaluate their beliefs. We also know significantly more about human psychology, which allows us to question our own beliefs even further. Sure, we are still influenced by self-interested motifs, but as we have become more aware of our biases, surely we are now in a better position to keep those self-interested motifs in check. Overall I would say that the symmetry objection is pretty ridiculous, given what I wrote above. Surely no one *truly* believes that educated people in the 21st century have a thought process which is just as distorted as the thought process of peasants 500 years ago, that´s ludicrous.
Yeah, I'm inclined to think this the best response, and I don't think Smyth deals with it all that well. He only mentions three potential distorting factors, and even for some of those, it looks like we have reduced their force. Organized religion just doesn't have the power it did in the past, at least in many areas of the West, even if our culture has been shaped by it. >> Surely no one truly believes that educated people in the 21st century have a thought process which is just as distorted as the thought process of peasants 500 years ago This is a strawman. The claim is only that the distorting factors cited to explain widespread moral error in the past are still at work today.
@@KaneB Yeah exactly, the fact that religion is far less influential nowadays seems to be a pretty huge difference. Regarding the last paragraph: But surely the fact that they are "still at work today" to a much smaller degree is completely unproblematic for a realist. Almost no serious moral realist believes that ALL of our intuitive moral judgements are true, they only believe that our thought process is good enough to recognise at least *some* moral obligations. So why should they be bothered by the fact that our thought process is still distorted in some cases?
@@dominiks5068 What I mean with that last paragraph is that I doubt most antirealists would claim that our thought processes are just as distorted as those of people in the past. They only need to claim that they are just as distorted with respect to moral judgement.
@@KaneB Ah, I see. So your point is that I should have written..... "Surely no one truly believes that educated people in the 21st century have a MORALITY-RELATED thought process which is just as distorted as the MORALITY-RELATED thought process of peasants 500 years ago, that´s ludicrous." ..... instead? Fair enough, but I still think that this claim would be ludicrous, even if it only applies to morality-related thought processes. I find it hard to believe that anyone truly believes that if they are being honest with themselves.
Concerning "denying disagreement". Your response seemed to be challenging the realist to explain how different moral practices are actually justified. The realist has the option of responding that this disagreement is grounded on mistakes. Different theories of disease, thunder and lightning, planets, motion, etc. persisted through centuries as well. This is different from the "non-moral error" response you discussed later. Just as humans can be mistaken about the non-moral facts for millennia, they can be mistaken about moral facts for millennia. To expect all cultures to hit upon all of the correct moral facts immediately after agriculture was invented is as unreasonable as expecting them to hit upon atomic theory, heliocentrism, evolution, and tectonic plate theory the instant agriculture was invented. Concerning "non-moral error". In this section, you seem to be suggesting that the moral realist must somehow explain how practices such as slavery and infanticide would be justified if their non-moral errors were corrected. Which assumes that cultures cannot, at the same time, also have some of the moral facts wrong. You never consider the possibility that mistakes can be a combination of false non-moral beliefs and false moral beliefs happening at the same time. Yes, we find rationalization and dumbfounding with respect to moral beliefs. We also find rationalization and dumb-founding with respect to non-moral beliefs. People make mistakes regarding the scientific facts concerning the efficacy of vaccines, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, and evolution. When presented with counter-evidence, they come up with rationalizations and assert (other) false beliefs that they accept only because it reinforces the (false) beliefs they already have. This phenomenon does not discredit the claim that there are scientific facts. People do not immediately change their beliefs regarding the wrongness of incest when given evidence, but they do not change their beliefs regarding evolution when given evidence either. You mention that learning moral attitudes may be like learning a language. I think that this is correct. However, one of the tools we use to learn a moral language is a presumption of truth in the propositions of a language. Without a presumption of truth, we could never interpret sounds into a language. There may be multiple ways to express a true proposition, but this does not imply that the same proposition can be both true and false. We must also consider the distinction between knowing how and knowing that. People know how to do morality, but they cannot explain how they do it. Like people know how to ride a bike, but cannot explain how they do it. If asked how they keep their balance while riding a bike, most will assert the false theory that they do so by shifting their weight. In fact, people maintain their balance by slightly turning the front wheel and allowing inertia to carry their center of balance back and forth. When they give their weight-shifting theory, we can discredit this by providing evidence against it. The fact that they cannot explain how they keep their balance does not prove that, therefore, they cannot actually keep their balance and cannot effectively ride a bike. The fact that they cannot explain how they make moral judgments does not prove that they cannot effectively make moral judgments. Your claims about the discrediting of slavery (your assertion that pro-slavery people would not become anti-slavery people when given reasons) is falsified by the huge number of pro-slavery people who became anti-slavery people in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Similarly, the philosophers of the enlightenment seemed to have had a very strong effect on beliefs about the divine right of kings. The fact that people do not respond to evidence in 10 minutes in a laboratory setting - particularly when it comes to core beliefs and attitudes - simply shows that these experiments do not properly model how people respond to evidence. Your response to "distorting factors" has a similar problem. These "distorting factors" also impact a person's non-moral beliefs. Yet, we hold that there are non-moral facts. Even though the distorting factors are as true today as it has been in the past, this does not give us reason to deny the existence of scientific facts. We can know that those whose beliefs on vaccines, global warming, and evolution are subject to distorting factors that there are facts of the matter regarding the effects of vaccines, greenhouse gas emissions, and survival of the fittest. One could deny scientific realism, but it is sufficient for my purposes to argue that moral facts are equivalent to scientific facts. NOTE: I am not an intuitionist. There is no direct perception of moral qualities. But, let us assume that color perception were malleable. By praising those who see things as one color and condemning those who see them as another, we could make it the case that people perceive things as yellow or red (like making it the case that we could cause people to perceive things as right or wrong). We would immediately use this power to ask, "What are the benefits of having people perceive these things as yellow?" We would promote as yellow-appearing those things that it benefits us to appear as yellow and as red-appearing where red appearance is useful. Morality is concerned with promoting useful value-appearances. This would be a matter of genuine debate. There would be a fact of the matter, supported by reasons, for one's conclusions. Having all street lights appear as green would be a genuinely bad idea. Given the fact that we cannot fine-tune our value appearances too precisely, giving all incest an appearance of bad is better than giving all incest an appearance of neutral. (By the way, I deny the existence of objective, intrinsic prescriptivity. I believe that there are moral facts, but moral properties are not objectively intrinsic properties, they are relational properties. More specifically, they are relationships between actions and those desires and aversions people have reasons to promote universally using praise and condemnation. This is not an infinite regress, it is a coherentist system. What matters is how a web of malleable desires fit together - a harmony of desires. Even though relationships between actions and malleable desires, and between malleable desires (those that can be modified using praise and condemnation) and other desires (those desires that provide the reasons to praise and condemn), cannot exist without desires, the facts about those relationships are independent of anybody's beliefs about those facts.)
'moral dumbfounding' does not seem to work for the religious, afterall its god who said its bad, therfor its bad by definition, they just don't know gods super special reasons as to why its wrong.
You gotta stop hitting home runs with all these killer videos Kane.. you're making everyone else on the internet look bad. We should do a John Cage talk that'll put everyone to sleep.. nice nap material for everyone.. everybody could use a nice nap
You appear to be searching for a categorical imperative that will (finally) justify liberal, individualistic, egalitarian values. An eighteenth century East Prussian gave the strongest arguments that have ever been made for such an imperative. That attempt failed. That doesn’t imply that no such argument exists. But it sure sets the bar very high.
Most people want to be happy and don't like to make other people or animals suffer(if is not a punishment or revenge.). So when we find a way to get what we want without making other people or animals suffer, we consider the old way wrong. Today, we don't need to rape woman to have sex, we don't need to slave people to have profit, we don't need to kill to have the basics for our survival... I think when fake meat become as cheap and good as real meat, kill animals to eat will be considered wrong, saving tribal society's. Because it will be a unnecessary suffer to get the pleasure of eat meat. So we become nicer people to others people and animals if this is easy, we become horrible people to others people and animals if it become hard to be nice. We are weak. So I think we will have different moral rules because do some actions in some places is easy and another places is hard, in some ages are hard and other easy, if become universally easy to not cause unnecessary suffer, it will be universally wrong cause unnecessary suffer. So I think morality is intersubjective. Do not exist without us, but is not created by us, is created by evolution.
