I'm just chilling around watching philosophy debates and end up watching this video. Then as I look at the members of the panel I'm surprised to see that my grandmother is there to the left, and her companion is the one asking the questions. What a find.
Hello, Her name is Diana Jonstone although she can be found with the last name Johnstone as well I believe. She's an american born, French nationalised journalist. The one asking the questions is Jean Bricmont. He's a Belgium Physicist, amongst other things. I do not know the name of the man sitting to the right of Chomsky though.
Thanks for your response - I've previously encountered Bricmont's public work via his contributions to the Sokal affair, and I shall watch out for your grandmother's contributions in the future.
RochesFan She published multiple books that might be of interest to you. Her books focus on the Yougoslavian affairs and the mistakes of the Clinton foreign policy. One title aimed in particular at Hillary Clinton is quite recent : “Queen of Chaos”. Another very recent book would also interest you : “From MAD to madness” this is the memoirs of my great grandfather who worked for the Pentagon and who denounces the nuclear war planning of the US followed by a commentary of my grandmother about the memoirs. It is an extremely recent book and has been very successful in Europe and most particularly in Germany. I don’t know if these subjects interest you but i would say it’s at least interesting to read about the inner workings of the Pentagon.
Lol....what u just said is so funny that I even doubt you realize how much funny it really is... Yes this french accent can't possibly get anymore French thah that..... lol P.s. it's an accent by a jew coming from an Eastern European country Greetings from Athens greece
@@BMerker Nope. His actual quote was "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch" which is "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong (or false which is a 1 to 1 translation) " the second part which is the relevant , Chomsky quotes correctly.
His main point is that since humans are biologically restricted, their moral systems are also restricted to a universal spectrum of morals, which therefore does not expand indefinitely.
+Kyle Witzen Does THAT make any sense to you? I mean, of course, what's the point of having a moral system that is based on what we don't know. That, to me, sounds a lot like religion. I thought he was not a religious guy
I don't think he means we have to know what set of morals we define for ourselves, like a religion or a society would try to. He means that humans have a Relative spectrum of capacities, but one that is definite because it does not extend to all human capacities. One could argue that if mere Free Will were the basis for all actions, morality would mean barely anything, and the spectrum would extend to anything humans were capable of. But I think he refers to moral systems shared by societies because societies can only function within a definite spectrum of moral principles. We can't all go around killing one another or ourselves: a society wouldn't function like that.
Sound reasoning but can any "spectrum" truely be regarded as universal? I mean isn't a spectrum impossible to be regarded in totality hench it is "spectrum"
Joris van Veen it's fun because we are discussing trying to apply logic here, which is universal. I'm sure just basic logic restricts A LOT the range of that moral spectrum. The more logical we're, the better. This postmodernism stuff is just a construction based on nothing. You can literally come up with infinite theories like that one by picking up just some patterns in human behaviour and start imagining shit from it. Postmodernism doesn't provide anything tangible to the World as physics or mathematics do. That's a big hint that suggests it's not real Science.
I don't agree with him on some things (albeit instinctively; I would fail miserably debating him), but I admire that every single word he says is important and relevant to his argument. He's different than any other public intellectual in that way. Chomsky is the most consistent thinker alive I can think of.
Although no longer alive, the writer I learned the most from as a young man was Gerhard Lenski. His book "Power and Privilege" continues to be worth the time to read and study.
@@ellcally508 Yes, he does that. I sent emails to him, he repeated those words and phrases. For him, content and understanding are more important than style.
@@DanielWieser In the sense that you could not survive as a 'brain in a vat'. Kant too says something similar in The Critique of Pure Reason about scepticism, that you could deny the existence of the world IN THOUGHT but you could not in experience (that can still be called human).
Chomsky is someone I admire because he is not just a critic of prevailing systems. He acknowledges human progress and also offers solutions according to his philosophy
That's because he's destroying their idiotic ideology with facts and one thing that Post Modernists hate, it's facts. They know with Chomsky they can't use their usual polysyllabic slieght of hand because he'll ruin them, so they just get frustrated. The woman particularly was livid.
@@derekrushe The guy on the right also wasn't bad, nearly hyperventilating and attempting interruptions when he started to question again near the end of the video. The canonical reaction of someone not too smart that sees their "deeply held beliefs" contested.
He is too old to care about it. Its Like thinking about what do to in an endurance race (his life) when its already ending. The results are already there, you cant change your position, theres nothing to do, Just keep racing.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:00 📚 Noam Chomsky discusses moral relativism and Michel Foucault's views. 01:21 🌍 Moral relativism exists in philosophy but not in ordinary life; it encompasses a broad spectrum. 04:11 🤔 Extreme moral relativism that claims values can range indefinitely is incoherent; it implies the existence of universal values. 10:58 🗣️ Moral disagreements can be debated and often resolved through reasoned discourse. 16:11 🌐 Over time, there is evidence of moral progress and a broadening of moral values towards greater tolerance and opposition to coercion.
"The direction is towards more tolerance of variation and more opposition to coercion and control. I think that's a very definite tendency and I think it suggests something pretty strong what the fundamental moral values are"
Actually, that's not true of the West (maybe you're referring to a different culture). We trended toward more freedom and tolerance because of a degree of coercion and control which brought us enough prosperity and high standard of living that we gained the individual power to demand and sustain our freedoms and tolerance. Now we are beginning to reign in our freedoms and tolerance because when you give a population that many degrees of freedom and tolerance of variation, the result becomes highly variable and unpredictable. Therefore, societies always oscillate back and forth between freedom and coercion on many different parameters. The hope is that we are balanced somewhere in the middle.
@@beanlegume9965 the problem is not freedom and tolerance itself. The problem lies in the divorce of freedom and accountability, as well as the tolerance to behaviors that destroys tolerance.
It's probably related to clean and safe environment. As soon as a major disaster hits people instantly forget about all of the tolerance and freedom of individuals
@@Bogdanko93 that all stands, but does one excludes another? I don't believe that any major environment agreement would be possible in the war time. Generally speaking, we based the most of our production sector on destroying the environments, it isn't very promising position for society since we depend largely on both of these,hopefully we will get much smarter.
I fully share Chomsky's values, but most of his arguments here, albeit intriguing, don't strike me as very strong. When he takes change as evidence for 'a universal moral grammar', his reasoning seems to be based on the idea that this change must be for the better, but that idea itself remains unmotivated. He just assumes progress towards a more correct moral system, but the objective difference in correctness is the very thing that he needs to prove in this discussion. If we continue the analogy with his linguistic theories - like languages, moral systems vary in space, as well as in time; like languages, children appear to learn different moral systems just as easily. And no linguist claims that one language as a whole at a given point in time is inherently closer to universal grammar than another, or that language change is progress towards perfect alignment with universal grammar. I don't see why that should be claimed about morality. I think the closest he came to a good argument was in the beginning. You literally can't be a moral relativist in practice, at least not without being a moral nihilist. To have a moral system *is* to consider it to be *the* right moral system. You can't hold the moral view that slaughtering children is bad and yet accept as equally valid the view of some other culture that it is good. It's inevitable that you should consider it evil, seek to discourage everybody else from doing it and otherwise try to prevent it if possible - if you don't, then you do not truly hold that moral view. It seems to me that ultimately, at the roots of every moral system, you find axioms that are based on feeling and experience, and the latter are subjective. To the extent that the axioms are shared, you can indeed progressively deepen your understanding of their consequences. But when they aren't shared or are differently weighted, rational discussion can't bring consensus about morality. For example, if somebody, as outlined by the person to the right, thinks that the 'survival' of a certain 'culture' (i.e. its preservation in a given state) is a value more important than the happiness and freedom of the individual human beings within it, then I think that it's difficult to prove him wrong with rational arguments - the only thing that I think may be likely to change his mind is further emotional experience.
Indeed. I think your last paragraph relates to Hume's guillotine (the is/ought problem), which makes it impossible to make these kinds of comparisons based on purely logical reasoning.
Don't you think our morals are also influenced by the facts we discover in the world? Like if you think it's a fact that seizers are cause by epilepsy you might think of them differently than if you think they are caused by demonic possession. When we know a criminal has a brain tumor we might have a different moral evaluation of responsibility. It could in theory be possible to discover something about the world that would inform us as to whether individual freedom is more important that cultural survival. Just because we don't know everything about ourselves and the world doesn't mean it's not in principal possible to arrive at the "right" moral decisions. Often people's morals change when presented with new information.
In reference to your last paragraph, you might not able to convince the person in question, but you can prove him wrong through demonstrating that his value leads to far more suffering and overrall maladaptivity than yours. The only response you could make then would be, well why is maladaptivity wrong? I'd respond by prompting you to consider what Homo sapien sapiens primates really mean when they say right/wrong; clearly not Good and Evil with caps in the sky, and to consider the purpose of our morality - a function of our brain evolved only for survival and reproduction - so anchored ultimately to survival and cooperation, no?
@@duxliberty7593 No, I completely disagree with the notion that evolutionary adaptiveness is a relevant criterion for right and wrong. The fact that we are shaped by evolution does not in any way mean that we must consciously choose for ourselves the same goals as evolution. We aren't male spiders that impale themselves on the female's fangs. Nor would such an adaptiveness-based 'morality' be the same as what most of us consider morally acceptable. We aren't male lions that eat the cubs of the previous leader of the pride. It isn't true that what humans 'really mean' by right/wrong is evolutionary adaptiveness/maladaptiveness - on the contrary, our various moral systems have always required us to choose completely maladaptive actions such as perform harakiri, die as martyrs for the faith, become celibate and many others.
@jaye see: it can't be 1946 because Chomsky looks about 60-70 in the video. That would put him at 130-140 yrs today (he's still around). Now that is very unlikely.
@kvrk2000 I would have gone with a much more daft response and said: It can't be 1946 because the video is in color. We know from footage that the world in 1946 was almost entirely black and white. Occasionally the world had color around that time because we have some footage of a colored world back then, but those were extremely rare occurrences. Therefore, the discussion could possibly have taken place in the mid-50s but more likely in the late 60s or early 70s. But the style of clothing does give me pause. And who allowed that housewife to have microphone, and why is she talking?!! Ah RU-vid, the place where idiots shine in their equal opportunity.
@@thestone7747 What does it mean for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? Is the act of presupposing the same as the act of reinstating, or is there a discontinuity between the power presupposed and the power reinstated? Consider that in the very act by which the subject reproduces the conditions of its own subordination, the subject exemplifies a temporally based vulnerability that belongs to those conditions, specifically, to the exigencies of their renewal.
Chomsky is a reminder to me how hard it is to actually remain logically consistent and exercise dry truth. Completely negate any flights of fancy from our thought.
@@Camcolito if you have any knowledge about cognitive function and behavior and also in history and current trends, and how we overthrow suppression, oppression for a more free and tolerable society, only you'll know what he's saying. Only books you read are the bibles??
Chomsky needs to download himself into an artificial body and become the curator to a museum dedicated to himself and his transition from human into digital entity. Right?
Ivan Cannon Or someone can do it for him using dialog from his many many recorded discussions, but that someone should get his written approval for this soon before he leaves the planet. ;)
many of Chomsky's scientific discoveries and observation expose philosophical extremes. He seems so pragmatic, practical, and measured scientifically. This is a gem of a presentation and helped me understand that "morality" can have (or likely does have) a scientifically measurable foundation. I often wondered why he said Foucault was the most amoral person he has ever met, and now I understand
It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler's work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.
he seems to reject abstract philosophising in favour of, as you've noted, a far more pragmatic view on the utility of normative moral & ethical philosophy. I think that probably stems from his studies in language, giving him keen insight into the significance of intersubjective meaning, which is highly relevant when discussing the formulation and communication of moral ideals.
@@Laocoon283 You should read his work on the Theory of Language. It is widely recognized as one of the most important achievements in my field, psychology.
@@MiguelCisnerosSaucedo And what part of that theory has any scientific backing? What data is he using to support his argument lol? None. It's literally just an idea that he has without any explicit evidence to support it. It's called philosophy because it lacks the merits to be considered science.
where is the full video of this debate? I can't find it and i can't tell when it was from or what venue it was done in or who the speakers are. Someone please reply.
I've never really watched Peterson but Chomsky says lots of intellectual dishonest and dismissive things. He is a very smart guy and I enjoy listening to him but if the pompous liberals that listen to him had actually read a true philosopher, they would realize his work is not very difficult to understand
I think it's namely a difference of specialization. Jordan Peterson, despite how he may project himself, is less of a philosopher and more of a psychologist. He has a much more nuanced view of philosophy due to his profession I think.
The Catholic speaker may seems like not win in this round of academic assembly，But the humble and beautiful behavior of filling up the cap for Chomsky has won my heart.
@@lesolstice_3465 Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible. These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.
@@omalone1169 Yes indeed this is a trap every generation of intellectuals have fallen into(obviously just a portion of it). The context and actual application might be different. But I believe the underlying cause remains the same. The inability to differentiate the constructs of the mind, from the actual things they ere made to represent.
Too many people sweep too many incongruous things under the label of postmodernism. Unless you've read the majority of the French philosophers from this era, you'd be tempted to think that this was a doctrine, and a homogenous one at that. Nothing could be further from the truth. There were many different and conflicting positions during the 70s and 80s among french philosophers, and in fact none of them ever called themselves "postmodern" thinkers. This is a label that was bestowed on them by American academic circles, on the basis that the concept of post-modernity was frequently cited (among others) in those days. It's impossible to conflate the hallucinatory discourse of Lacan and Derrida, with that of Deleuze and Lyotard, for instance (and I read them in French, my native tongue). Lacan was a scam artist living off his impersonation of psychoanalytical discourse and amazing ability to improvise incoherent discourse in front of a mesmerized student audience. Derrida was somewhat similar but slightly more coherent while not offering a particularly potent set of ideas. At the opposite, Deleuze was highly coherent and we owe him among other things powerful concepts such as the rhizome, in place of the antique concepts of hierarchy and arborescence. In parallel, Lyotard's admirable and visionary essay, The Postmodern Condition, predicted back in the mid-70s everything that we witness today with social media, knowledge databases and the collapse of traditional discourse. A must read. There's not a shred of what's come to plague US academia in these works: so-called "cultural studies", gender studies, identity politics and so forth. It would be a fallacy to claim otherwise. These are anglo-saxon extrapolations stemming from a gross misreading of many of these philosophers' various intents.
Phil Pan the way it's used on line by alt right is pretty much a boogey man term. It's coupled with Marxism to sound even scarier. It's a 4channic way to misuse language.
Agree with you! People nowadays prefer to hearing from left-wing intellectuals like Chomsky than to reading actual "postmodern" works. And about the 1971 debate between Chomsky & Foucault, I would say that Chomsky was as idealistic as he is now.
And the funny thing is that most philosophers who were "postmodern" discarded their initial Marxism, whereas orthodox Marxists and leftists (like Chomsky) are militantly against "postmodernism", and specifically the critique of objectivity.
I just love him. Not only for his stance at advocacy on things, but the way he explains things. While some of the things post-modernists go into are definitely intriguing, it ends up, getting pretty woolly and obscure pretty quickly, and then the defence is, well, that’s because you don’t understand it, because of all these obscure things that are happening in your brain, which are the very things you can’t understand. That may be true, but it also might just be a convenient way to stop the conversation
I agree with David Hume on the subject, that our moral values and ethical systems are rooted in our sentiments. The universe in and of itself is amoral; however, human society must have moral and ethical systems to be a cohesive group. These systems vary from machine to machine (to borrow a term from Deleuze) based on the rhizomes that connect them. It is each of our own responsibilities as individuals and more broadly social groups to develop consistent ethical systems predicated on a set of base values that align with our sentiments.
Sounds easy enough. Now try to let everyone wholeheartedly agree to that set of base values. There are many, many schools of ethics. Some even joke that there is always one that supports the outcome you desire. And none of them have been proven consistent. There has always been some smart philosopher who found a particular case that was consistent with that particular ethical system, but completely incompatible with what is generally accepted.
I think the other panelists are actually grasping at good points and valid criticisms of Chomsky's argument, but they let themselves get all worked up and flustered for some reason and it totally undermines the arguments they're trying to make.
My line of thinking is similar to Chomsky, namely through Jungian ideas (and Bastian) that there is a universality of behavior patterns and cognitive functions etc. but I have no problem admitting that this is an abstraction. Chomsky misses Foucault's point entirely. I don't think that Foucault was a moral relativist. I think Foucault's main interest was how regimes of power act upon the individual and that a priori abstractions of human nature were often inaccurate because they are conflated with the structural manifestations. This happens all the time. As Foucault said, "we don't know what our natures are." Perhaps a more cutting response by Chomsky to Foucault would have been, "yes true, but we know what our natures aren't." But Foucault has a point that is important to grasp. Foucault has a critique similar to that of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity and similar to Freud's idea of the superego. Namely that the institution of Christianity became a structural morality which conditioned the individual while considering itself universal. So why wouldn't other regimes of power consider themselves universal and then condition a morality which the participants naively consider "the natural order of things" when it's not. Christianity universalized itself but was not universal. Humanism, Science etc. is not necessarily an escape from this conditioning effect on the individual and collectively. The notion of universality has a blind spot. Take Foucault's elaboration of homosexuality. The gay movement at the time of Foucault naively pointed to Ancient Greece as a time when it was socially acceptable to be gay. Foucault pointed out that the modern idea of "gay" was not at all like the homosexuality of Ancient Greece. The Ancient Greeks saw effeminacy as shameful, saw being penetrated by a man as adolescent and feminine and shameful for an adult male, and marriage to woman was obligatory. What the gay movement was doing was romanticizing and overly universalizing and was completely blind by their romantic musing. Chomsky, here, even uses the phrase "the oppression of homosexuals" as if homosexuality is the ontological essence of certain human beings, which is a common modern idea, but the Ancient Greeks didn't believe that. "The homosexual" is a western structural idea. And if you look at another analogous structure like Native American two spirit, also romanticized by LGBT activists, it was structured radically differently. Male born Two spirits for example were not allowed to marry each other they married normative males. A completely different structural phenomenon. So were the normative males the two spirits married gay or homosexual. The native Americans would not have this idea. Our notions of human nature is always conflated and blurred with specific structural cultural manifestations. And is specifically because our notions of human nature are often abstract potentialities. And this is not trivial. Has there not been wars waged because a culture understood God differently? We can wage war on other cultures who understand human nature differently and we do. We can also try to "liberate" another culture which is really imposing our structure onto another culture. I believe that the psyche is as Chomsky describes but overconfidence in our notions of universality is arrogant and has been used before as an excuse for violence.
Thanks for the infotmative post. But if morals are really relative, on which grounds do we condemn slavery and genocide. A nazi could easily say its ok in his moral framework to commit genocide. And he could also accuse you of imposing your liberal values upon him. If you stop him you would be imposing your values. If you don't you would allow genocide.
@@freandwhickquest Here in America we have a president who tries to invalidate the concept of truth; in fact, he just lost an election and is trying to say he actually won it. Is he just imposing his values on the people of America, or is actually a lying POS trying to subvert democratic institutions?
@@JeffRebornNow in an era when the right wing tries the invalidate the concept of truth, left wing should defend rationalism, justice, openess, human rights and critical thinking. Post truth is becoming a right wing tactic. This is the reason why, while i still respect foucault, i find chomsky much accurate in his defence of the pursuit of reality.
@@freandwhickquest I agree. I think the cultural relativists cut their own throats making truth merely the imposition of a regime of power. I thought they were wrong 30 years ago when I was in graduate school and reading Foucault and learning all this shit. The humanities professors -- the tenured radicals -- were so hopped up on attacking Western Civ. for its imperialism that they were willing to downgrade (or make completely relative) all of Western Civ.'s cultural acquisitions, including logical reasoning and the scientific method.
@@JeffRebornNow it feels to me that that extreme versions of relativism started to lose power even in acedemia. (Yes they still seem vocal because they are anxious) In the earliest days of postmodernism, concepts like truth and morality was being used by the conservative establishment to control the power discourse. In order to allow the percieved "immoral" modes of behaviors, to bypass the christian dogmatism, the existence of morality started to be denied.(they went to far) This was actually a tactic. Some professors etc. took the concept seriously. Over time the left itself became the dominant culture. Now it is slowy going to leave relativism just believe me. This extreme relativist wave is almost about to reach its peak. New paradigm will not be the same as the ancient one, it will balance the relativism with rationalism.
This is an interesting and thought provoking talk, as always. I like to think that cultures that are still reppressive in some or many ways are capable of reflecting and changing. Sadly, to me, going through excrutiating pain and loss is the way we do it...We learn from loss and crises. Actually, I hope that we learn from loss and crises because too often i see history repeating, as some of us fail to learn.
This whole thing completely misses the real objection to moral relativism: you can't jump from there being widespread disagreement to there being no correct answer. Chomsky here is just saying "well the disagreement really isn't that wide, it's bounded", but that's beside the point. There very well could be unlimited disagreement (there isn't, Chomsky's right about that, but we can suppose that there were), and that would say nothing at all about whether any of those many positions different people held, or some other position nobody holds, is the correct or incorrect one. Agreement is not the same thing as truth, and disagreement (however wide or narrow) says absolutely nothing about whether or not there is a truth to the matter. The truth could be a position that nobody presently holds. Consider, for a different example, the true theory of physics that unites our quantum and relativistic models. Nobody knows what that is, and opinions on what it might be vary, within limits but still, they vary. But nobody with half a brain takes that to mean that there is no truth of the matter to be found. Just that the question of what that truth is has not yet been adequately settled.
Excellent point! But I don't think Chomsky would actually say that progress is the same as truth. Truth is itself a concept. Also, there always remains the possibility that moral progress be followed by degradation if, for example, extreme circumstances occur on the environmental level and consequently on the economic and social level), to give a very concrete example. Chomsky has been always a freedom fighter, to give another example, yet he does not have a clear ideological truth. He observes, studies, and expresses his views.
The problem isn't that we disagree on the answer, but that there is an answer to be had. The problem is that we disagree on what it would mean know the answer at all. What would count as evidence, explanation, or knowledge of the answer. This is not the same as disagreements in the natural sciences (although i think even in physics this is not so clear).
Moral relativism may be interpreted as a claim about bounded infinity. While the idea that knowing the bounds could anchor the social order is an optimistic one, the bounds can be so general and open ended as to leave the field of morality open for infinitely many conflicts that are irresolvable in any absolute way.
As far as I know, the two guys with Chomsky, Jean Bricmont and Normand Baillargeon are part of "the Chomsky left". I think they are more vocal than him on the dangers of postmodernism, "the new left". Jean Bricmont might have wanted Chomsky's idea on it.
I always wondered whether Chomsky gave up his theory of universal grammar, as I am a person who doesn't read Chomsky and only watch his videos on yt. Could someone informed please tell me what he thinks about CxG? He said (after hesitating) that we "construct" our culture on the basis of input
Simon Mergner It probably is because the structure would lean too much on a imperialistic imperative and it would discredit his international standing. Also, I am assume though, that he is outclassed in his knowledge by renowned Neurologist regarding the subject.
I agree with Chomsky for sure. I just want to inform everybody that John Dewey, Charles S. Peirce and William James were saying the same thing not to long ago. Chomsky comes from a great American tradition!
Chomsky has certainly been influenced by the ideas of John Dewey. And as a piece of trivia: up until high school, Chomsky even went to a Deweyite school.
RU-vid has an uncanny way of addressing topics I was just thinking about. I have long held the view that if I understood other cultures, I would embrace them. Although I have found this to be true in general, it now seems to be simplistic.
@@omalone1169 I used to sound so naieve. I did not have many friends of other cultures, as I had recently moved to Canada. I would not say such a thing now.
the fixed basis for morality is in my view: human ability to empathize, and human selfishness in the absolutest form, starting from the genes and ending in everyday behavior and thought. if you combine the ability to see in select others yourself, those you can empathize with enough, and the innate selfishness you see i think the whole spectrum of morality in any of its forms. this theory i started by thinking about an old saying thats extremely common, that goes by: would you like this done to you? or treat others as you would want them to treat you.
I personally find a problem in the view of ''Seeing in others, yourself'' or ''To put yourself in someone else's shoes''. This is just a self projection and one of the worst kinds of Anthropomorphisms. We see it time and time again in the case of various Animal activists, Climate activists, Vegans, Vegetarians etc. This projecting of ourselves, our capacity of mind and our conscious experience upon things which are not us and do not have our Quantitative capacities (Very important to not mean Qualitative). I could ''put my self in someone else's shoes'' but that wouldn't solve anything for that person or animal (Or me) who I'm apparently attempting to ''Empathise'' with. Because I would react to the situation as I would react to it, as only I could/can, with my capacities, experiences, emotions etc which are not the same as the person who's shoes and situation I am projecting myself onto. I am only me and not them and them are only them and not me. The problem is that I would react to the situation how I would react to it and want to react to it which would likely be different from that person. People state that one should put themselves in the ''shoes'' of animals, so we shouldn't ''Harm them'', but the problem is, is that I'm still, thinking/experiencing/feeling like a human animal with this, I'm not experiencing anything of the ''Pig'' mind/conscious experience. I'm not experiencing the life or nature of a ''Pig'', I'm doing nothing of the sort except just in a state of imaginative illusion. Its just an Anthropomorphic projection. This, I feel, is the same outcome for the other maxim ''Treat others as you would want to be treated''. This maxim would have to apply all the time, I would have to treat all others as if (Effectively) they were me. The problem is, is that what is ''good'' for me is ''bad'' for someone else and could also be ''Indifferent'' to someone else further still (As Spinoza remarks). So, following the maxim, I would not attack anybody because I would not be attacked, but that only extends as far as me and my actions in reality, for I am only this singularity. If somebody else attacks me, I will defend myself, for I do not want to be destroyed, but If I'm following the maxim (Of treating people as I would want to be treated, and ultimately projecting myself upon everyone as if they were me), I surely should not defend myself?, for if I was the one attacking, I would not want somebody to defend themselves against me as that would impede my attack and goal of overpowering you (for whatever reason), but that would just be absurd on my part and the maxim ultimately becomes incoherent projection. The maxim only makes sense in a case of Moral Relativism. How I want to be treated is ultimately different from how somebody else wants to be treated. There is no fixed platonic objective moral standard pervading above us to which we should strive to adhere to.
Every argument or point of view, no matter what it is, always leaves out something. That's why there is always room for a counter-argument -- ad infinitum.
I didnt follow chomsky's argument that moral relativists are committed to universal values, perhaps someone could help me out. And even if we do have some universal moral system, that doesnt necessarily mean that those values are good or correct. Isnt it possible (likely?) that our universal moral system is flawed or biased?
+astrofunkswag Let's say you want to drive from LA to NYC. You could plot out hundreds of paths. Some faster than others, some more scenic, some through more urban areas, etc. Moral relativism says all these paths are equivalent and you cannot judge these paths as objectively good or bad merely based on your own standards for the trip. So if you wanted the fastest route it does not make the slowest route bad or a person who desires a longer route bad. They are all good but different routes. Chomsky points out that all the paths are paths to NYC so the moral relativist must accept that there is at least one objective value in all these paths and that is getting to NYC. From there we might find out that travel time and aesthetic appreciation are also universal values even if individually we might balance those universal values differently in our own choices. If you do not accept at least the universal value of getting to NYC then you have to look at a map of all possible paths to all possible points on the map and that leaves you with a worthless mindset.
+astrofunkswag Our moral system may be good or bad, but we could never know, as we have no other frame of reference to review it. On this point, we as a species are perfectly agnostic.
+The Kielich Law Firm Your analogy implies that there is a well-defined telos or end which all humans seek-- one as clear cut as the goal of reaching NYC. This is basically Aristotle's position, his argument for "final causes" to which all our behavior is directed. Is that what you intended to communicate? If so, I'm not sure this is Chomsky's view at all.I'm pretty sure the universals he has in mind are not goals but moral standards that are true despite states of being like happiness, as with say Kant. His analogy was the visual system of a species. Just as all members of a species are constrained by neurological givens, he asserts, so are they constrained by moral givens (a priori structures, like his Language Aquisition Device argument). These are, he thinks, probably genetic and certainly a priori. But even if we give his linguistic position a pass (and not all linguists do), it doesn't follow that moral frameworks are organized in the same manner. He repeats the claim that they are, that they are akin to a visual system, an empirically well defined structure. But repeating an analogy and insisting on its cogency does not establish much beyond his own convictions.
+silverskid PS The NYC analogy which sounds like teleological ethics is problematic whether or not it is what Chomsky has in mind (which I 'm pretty sure it is not). Usually the assumption is that when we say all people desire well-being and happiness (Aristotle's Eudaimonia), that a) they all mean pretty much the same thing by using these terms and b) that the states of well-being and happiness can only result from a causal chain of virtuous or good actions. At that point it becomes necessary to, for example distinguish the self-perception of a criminal who feels "happy" and "well" despite his crimes, from the state of being enjoyed by a starving pauper who is virtuous but in some hard-to-define way embodies moral and psychical well being. This is why Kant insists that morally good acts may or may not result in happiness (in this life, at least). Thus consequences (such as becoming happy after doing x or y) play no role in identifying the ethical. Ethics doesn't reduce to ends-means reasoning such as "If I use route 9 then I will reach NYC" etc. Utilitarians would use your analogy and define NYC as "Greatest Good" which leads to the problems Mill and his successors have to deal with.
I get the problems you get with Foucault and similar theorists. And I also feel like there‘s some higher absolutes that are formed above the cultural level. However, I think that it‘s not a psychological/ genetic thing as Chomsky proposes (I‘m not an expert here, but that‘s what his argument seems like to me.) To the contrary, I think that it‘s the fact of plurality - the fact that we live with other living beings and our lives are related to them - that makes us form absolutes in the form of morals like justice or equality. That‘s why people from all kinds of different times and cultures come up with different ideas: they all live together with others, and they grow close to them, and they become dependent on them, and they aim to survive living with them. I don‘t know if that makes me a relativist or an absolutist or whatever you would call the opposite, but I think it‘s as simple as that.
Well you're just saying it is this because it is this. We all know that our lives are related to other living beings in some sense. But wouldn't you say that's nature? or that's because of our nature? or in other words biology? I don't like the latter term but it's basically the other face of the same coin. I think we have innate disposition to view intrinsic value in each other. This is my view because of my religion, Islam. Now, anyone can say I'm an absolutist but at least I'm coherent as I think Noam Chomsky would put it.
It's both. You can't learn anything without an algorithm to facilitate that learning. So, if a child derives moral values by observing others, it must be born with algorithms that facilitate it. That analyze the data (observations) and build appropriate structures in its brain. Of course, when a child is born, it's still "being built," the facility might not be ready, but it's internal. A child born without any "programming" would never learn anything. It must be something based in biology, something entirely internal. If you get something, it can't come out of nothing. That's what Chomsky is talking about (that internal structure which makes the leap possible). What you're talking about are those scattered data points that he talks about as well. You need both. Data and an algorithm. Food and process. What Chomsky argues, I believe, is that the algorithm largely shapes the outcome because there are many voids to fill between individual data points. I guess you could imagine it like a curve fit. Algorithm is the curve. And you manipulate that curve to fit your observations. Or more precisely, algorithm would describe the process of curve fitting. But in order to do that, it must internally work with a curve or set of curves. Take homosexuality. The pivotal point was the realization that sexual orientation is not your choice. And that was a scientific discovery. Actually, the underlying research, as far as I know, was military - because some young men tried to avoid service by claiming to be homosexual. A device was created for measuring sexual arousal. What they proved was that homosexuality actually exists, that there is such a thing as sexual orientation. It's not just a decadent behaviour you choose to engage in or disease you can cure. And if it's outside of their control, it's wrong to punish them for it. So, our understanding of human nature evolved and as a result application of our moral code evolved. But that discovery in itself didn't prove that it's not a disorder and that it should be tolerated. There was a shift probably related to what I wrote (not in their control => wrong to punish) - their behaviour causes us no direct harm and we started seeing them as victims (of nature's bad joke). You might think this process was right and I'm not saying it wasn't, but try applying the same logic to pedophiles. It probably won't go down well. Yet they are just as incapable of influencing their preference. Personally, I never saw any point in the persecution of homosexuals exactly because they cause me no harm but that was related to the general attitude of our prevailing religions towards sex (it serves to procreate and anything else is wrong). Sodomy (essentially, you could say sex for pleasure) was seen as a choice (not the urge but you acting on it). So, the change in religious attitudes was a precursor. Without it, we wouldn't make the shift. We could still choose to condemn them and burn them at the stake for our enjoyment (indeed, in places like Bruges, people were burned at a stake for their sexual activities). And remember, we're talking about a "crime" that leaves practically no evidence. They would simply torture you until you confessed. Of course, if you were a respectable citizen, you were far less likely to suffer that fate as substantial evidence would be needed to touch you. In general, I think there is the question of undesirability of certain attributes and how we treat people who possess them. On one hand, you've got people who believe that some things are undesirable and they go out to eradicate those people to get rid of it, to stop it from spreading. On the other hand, you've got people who say anything goes, there is no such thing as undesirable, everything is natural, human, etc. Personally, I'm in the middle. I do believe that some things are undesirable or downright inferior, but I don't want to be cruel to the people. Isn't it bad enough that they suffer from whatever it is they suffer from? In my eyes, it really comes down to evolution and the unpleasant fact that for evolution to happen, someone has to die or not reproduce. And I have a feeling that without this continuous trimming, we're going to deteriorate and degenerate as a species. Which I find undesirable. It looks like entropy to me. Yet I wouldn't want the power and responsibility for choosing what is superior, what is right. Because one way forward is to use genetic engineering to fix problems as needed. So, even people with defects could reproduce, we could just fix those problems in their children. I'm not sure we should have that power. I don't think we have evolved far enough. I think our tools are further than our minds. It's kind of like giving nuclear weapons to children. But what is the alternative? Let the weak die? Sterilize them? That probably doesn't sound very appealing.
We have been progressing toward “more tolerance of diversity and more opposition to coercion and control.” Feeling safer and as such valuing freedom and creativity more than safety. Good for us!
She's saying that as we become more tolerant of diversity, we're less afraid of people that look and speak differently from us. We're not as frightened of our differences, we feel safer. Hence we don't need oppressive structures (racial segregation, subjugation of women) to protect some idea of "safety" (which more often than not manifests as fear of some "other").
There is a masterclass on Systems Theory within the framework of Chomsky's logic for his argument here. There is (what I feel is) a logical fallacy of non-systematized systems in question. By predicating his assertion on analogs and anecdotes of human biology, he's arriving at a conclusion of predicative sub-systems (a set of meta-principles that govern relative principles and the variations of those principles). This falls apart if biology/physics doesn't serve as the primary driving mechanism of morality generation. Practically speaking, Chomsky's probably right from a sociobiological perspective and wrong from a purely biological perspective. One only needs to think of a simple hypothetical experiment to test this: assess the gradual moral changes of a particular human society that has been isolated from every culture here on Earth for the entirety of their history, with no apriori exposure to any citizen's mind. This could very well be a possibility in the future with further space colonization. Chomsky's assertion in this scenario would still be that this society would indeed develop through similar (if not exactly the same) meta-moral changes over the course of its existence; however, I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe this would actually be the outcome. Too many exterior factors influence our current understanding of psychology and sociology. If this isolated version of humanity's environment had an intellectual stimulus that promoted something radically different from any form of moral analog on Earth, would they still find themselves on a similar track to their Earth analogs after enough time passed? I don't think so personally, unless it is so deeply inherently tied to our biological frameworks of hormone control, sensory experiences, and bodily regulation. A side note: humanity's broad thought projects (aka most of philosophy) are limited by its contextual precedents in both biological (neurological structures) and existential situatedness (place and time in the universe). We're damned to never find truth because of our tie to our biology. Such is the way it goes.
Humans are not just biological systems but a stack of systems built on top of a base innate biological structure. Humans living in an isolated, cutthroat environment like medieval northern Europe for example will have a very limited moral sphere. But in order for societies to scale up there has to be an increase in reciprocity between people of different groups, as it has been proven both in game theory and empirical economics that the long term mutual benefits of cooperation and specialization are greater than those of egoistic behavior, both on individual and group level. People usually say humans are social animals, and that is the foundation of our power. When a society reaches significant scale and prosperity it is thus quite probable that moral concern and reciprocity are extended to more groups like slaves, homosexuals etc. like mentioned in the video. The only society I could think of where this wouldn't be true is one where power is more disconnected from social cooperation, like the ruling class using military robots to control the society instead of other humans. That is an entrenchment of power which is completely resistant to revolution. My point is if you look at it from a big enough perspective I think biological and social perspectives on morality converge.
I love watching Noam destroy questions almost from the off, my favourite is when he replies 'there isn't even a debate anymore' or 'it's quite the norm across the industry/field/spectrum' etc , it's a good style and he's being doing it all his career
Those phrases hardly “destroy” questions. By saying there isn’t a debate anymore, either the issues must have been reconciled or it’s admitting concession. Otherwise it’s just declaring “I win” and copping out. They’re parlor tricks.
@@-dash if you bring a point that is not even debated or, in other words, is factually wrong then it is good to be reminded that it is so otherwise people will think that your assumption is valid and common. Where in reality it's no longer a matter of debate that it is wrong. So I think it's fair. That doesn't mean he won't entertain the idea but that he will do so only on that basis. At the end of the day if something isn't commonly held to be true and you're using it as a precursor for bigger argument you're making a bigger claim than you can support. Question your foundations first.
@@j.r.r.tolkien8724 there isnt even a debate anymore, that you are completely wrong. I won’t elaborate, just know that consensus has been reached, and I win, and you lost.
with the light of belief more then anything. I wonder what he would say today to this statement for moral progress. His belief must be shaken significantly
There’s no progress. Of any kind. The ape is, and will forever remain, just that- an ape. The so- called ‘moral progress’ is just the product of temporarily muting the animal instincts with the material comfort in the relatively affluent West. The Enlightenment goes through the stomach. Take away the take aways, the Facebook, the petrol, in short, scratch a little the varnish of civilisation and see the apes in all their wild ‘splendour’. Capitalism is a relatively comfy slavery (for the middle class which acts as a buffer and means of repression of the lower class including the ‘untouchables’- the poor, the disabled, the elderly). So is communism- a more obvious form of slavery; communism failed as a social experiment because the communist regimes weren’t clever enough to create and buy a middle class large enough to reach critical mass to be effective. You sell yourself on the job market for more or less money. Morality is NOT based on the biology. Animals are amoral. Humans were supposed to be moral- if only they could have become more than animals. In nature, the strongest animal survives, not one with moral qualms which has come to be associated with being psychologically deficient. Do not kill, do not steal, do not lie- these are AGAINST the natural animal impulses. The moral law is definitely not the product of the ape mind. The fact that morality didn’t really catch with human apes is the best proof. You can create the perfect legal systems to enshrine the moral law…what do apes do? Create ways to circumvent the laws. Give them any reason to be truly themselves i.e. unhinged animals and they will wipe their arses with ‘Do not kill’ in exchange for a war medal, redemption of their souls, or just for the pleasure of killing. Throw them a bait in social media and they will gang- up against ‘the adversary’ waiving the bloody flag of the day, barking the bloody slogans of the day, cheering for the bloody influencer of the day. Watch them lynching those who are not like them. What morality? Like capitalism and communism, the entire apekind is a failed experiment and no amount of wishful thinking or nice philosophy will change that.
The only truth I have discovered philosophically true from the 21st century is to find people that like for who you are- and the better you know who you are, the more rewarding life is 🥂🍾 initially I constructed myself as the best person I could conceive of being. Then I accepted the person I became.
This is absolutely brilliant, mind-expanding analysis. Poetic almost, artistic in word play but dynamic in observation of the boundaries, limitations but expansiveness of human consciousness as interconnected to the parameters of layers of levels of existence that many other beings and entities must also conform to, but fluctuate from within and outwardly into a flux of levels of awareness and "moral relativity" combined.
"In discussing human affairs you don't have proofs, we don't understand enough" (15:51) A good metric for discussing human affairs in a sensible manner is the degree to which we relate to others, the Otherness Quotient of the individual, the group, the society, the culture. In high crime neighborhoods the "other" has no value except with a few individuals.
Can somebody explain what he means when he says that: the moral relativist claim, is that moral values can range indefinitely and that this is predicated on the assumption that human beings gain their morals through culture. How are the two correlated? Thanks
It's interesting that what Chomsky is saying about innate structures is so intuitively simple and observably true, that some people have a hard time grasping it.
They don't want it to be true so they won't see it or entertain it as plausible. They are already militantly committed to their own radical conceptual framework that everything else is false ad hoc.
This is not a rhetorical question but a genuine one: what are the basis of those intuitions and observations that suggest that morality is in some sense contingent upon internal structures of biology, as Chomsky seems to argue? Are there, in the very least, empirically verifiable foundations to hold this view on morality? Not gonna lie, what Chomsky suggests in the video does not render his claim incontrovertible by any standard.
@@ashraykotian1 I think he does make the assumption that moral systems, like all others (visual, language, whatever), are biological. Given this assumption then that is the emperical evidence I suppose, it's self-evident, given the assumption. But I also agree with you that this does not emperically prove that our reason is biological in nature. I am not sure if I agree with this assumption of his. I am catholic so I think morality originates from God. However according to church philosophers, this morality is also innate to us and man can discover it by reason alone, which actually kind of aligns with Chomsky's view. I am not sure where Chomsky's thinking goes beyond this, as in, how did it become innate in the first place? Naturalism would say its origins are purely natural and try to form various theories about that like evolution (which I think are wrong). Religions would obviously say they were put their by God.
@@geofreyr I just don't see how the appeal to biological basis for morality, which at face is entirely reasonable and I'd even say observable, can be used to leap to the conclusion that some objective moral basis exists under it all. Even accepting that we're limited in what morals we can conceive due to our limited compute capacity (genetics and such), one must acknowledge that the biological systems themselves are not fixed. With every birth the genetic source code varies slightly. And it continues to vary slightly until death. So, it follows that the entire "objective basis" for a biological morality is also fluid. And as such, is neither objective nor fixed, but rather a function of some genetic or physical parameters.
I don't understand what Chomsky means when he keeps saying that in order to acquire a cultural there has to logically be universal values? Can anyone spell it out for me?
If you accept that a culture has a necessary structure, a form of some kind, then this has to be true. For example, in order to make the statement "There are cultures" an individual has to perceive specific information (e.g. the words 'there' 'are' and 'cultures' and their meanings) that she finds (or find her) in the world, then process that information in a certain way which ultimately results in the words being spoken. The fact that we all know what this statement means and agree with it shows that there are certain principles of information processing (synonymous with a 'value') common to us all. If we all had randomly determined information processing mechanisms (values), most people would not be able to understand this statement, because they would value other information, such as the number of fibres in a piece of carpet, or a particular sound their body makes. Instead what happened is that the people who really loved counting carpet fibres all died of dehydration, the only types of people who are alive today are those whose value structures led to behaviour which resulted in them producing fertile offpring. This means our value structures do vary naturally, but there are bounds to these values enforced by natural selection.
@@aleksandarcankulovski9070 Yes. How could we be tabula rasa: we arose from pond slime, and every step of the way to becoming human, we have built on our beginnings. As Chomsky often puts it, we aren't angels, we are animals, and this animal nature is what gives us our 'scope" AND our 'limits" - just as we don't the navigational skills of some insects, we lack many abilities, especially cognitive ones (as do all Earthlings). There are some excellent videos of Chomsky lecturing on our limitations.
What I love about Chomsky is how he can be so right about so many things but so stubbornly wrong about so many others. Especially his ideas on objective truth and morality. So much circular reasonin here.
@Sophia G. I believe in objective truths and it is an assumption for the scientific method not that empirical science is the best tool to acquire such truths.
@@thembluetube The closest you'll get to truth in science is a theory. Which is induction. It is not meant to be _absolutely_ universal. It is meant to be the purest form of induction there is. It's like saying asking me the time and i say "10:30" "not absolute enough" "10:30:22" "nope" "10:30±10sec " "not yet" "Here's a probability distribution of the time over the whole clock" "Nooo" "The time is now" "Perfect!"
Only real problem with what Chomsky said was the rental car analogy. You take care of the rental car because if you don't you will be fucked by the business and the law.
Matthew Frazier well, partly, but presumably even if you knew you wouldn't be legally punished for damaging it, you would still feel that you owed it to the real owner not to damage his property as far as possible.
He will admit that today 2023, there are more avenues of help, more venues to engage in discussion and more awareness of the issues than ever before. Choices are out there and ''the movement'' as far as women, and LGBTQ and people of color are all moving forward. -his words not mine.
There should be a Noam Chomsky for everyone who can tell you, that there is good in everone, when you feel down. One thing that bothers me though, is that he doesn't really answer the guys last question. It comes down to the question if human dignity is more important then the power of religious leaders (i think). In my opinion it is a really good question that has a lot of value/importance right now. I would have liked to hear his opinion on that.
'Our moral-system is tied to our biological-system'. This is incredibly profound; and ABSOLUTELY correct. Realizing this would certainly make understanding most of human behaviors a great-deal easier.
I think, from what Chomsky is saying in this interview and others, that he would agree that there is nothing transcendantale moral. Rather morality is a consequence of the physical nature of humans and their history. If it is true that Foucault believed that there are unlimited moral frameworks it must be under the premise that any number of histories with any number of sapient being are creating these moral systems. For instance surely Foucault would not deny ought implies can, it cannot be immoral for a human not to fly like superman because we cannot fly like superman . Therefore some limits must exist on possible moral frameworks. I think rather that the takeaway is that morality is not innate it is a social system created by interaction of humans with other humans. There may be an innate system promoting the creation and preservation of people groups, but this system depends on are work as moral agents to be defined. Absolute relativism is absurd on the face of it. But it allows us to question what is at the core of human experience allowing us to discard bias we might otherwise be incapable of perceiving. There are by now systems such as intersectionality and falsifiability that allow us to move away from relativism into a new paradigm without losing track of what we have learned from postmodernism. There is no meaning except that which we produce ourselves.
I also think what he is saying is - as you put it - that there is nothing transcendantale moral. At 14:49 he says that "there must be a fixed basis" which, as I understand, is a basis which follows from human biological nature - e.g. we are biologically pre-determined to build culture in a certain way which essentially entails for example the belief that killing other people is morally wrong. But to me, such a "fixed basis" actually sounds like an argument in favor of moral relativism, and not against it. For example, there could be an alien species whose biological nature pre-determined them to consider killing others of their kind as morally acceptable - their "fixed basis" would be different to ours. Similarly, theoretically human biological nature may also undergo some modifications in the future (e.g. due to evolution or due to technological advancement) which would change our "fixed basis". So, since the "fixed basis" which pre-determines morality is susceptible to change, this essentially means that morality itself is also susceptible to change, and thus relative. Absolute morality would mean that there are some transcendetal rules of morality which are independent of one's biological nature and remain the same regardless of the changes to this biological nature. I wonder what you think about this and whether there is any further reading you could suggest on this.
@@Pushkodlon "Let me tell you what chomsky actually meant with my pedantic rant about how actually he leaned more towards postmodern philosophy HURR durr"
" I think rather that the takeaway is that morality is not innate it is a social system created by interaction of humans with other humans. " But you can also ask whether the social system that promotes these kind of interactions of humans with other humans is in itself moral or not. You can morally judge the social system itself by the kind of interactions it leads to and this judgement can't come from the social system itself, it must be transcendental in the sense of transcending mere cultural habit and being grounded in something else instead.
@@thechadeuropeanfederalist893 You can ask whether a social system is moral, but you must do so from the framework of some social system, because the question is being asked by a person and that person exists within a society that colors their moral beliefs. There is no context free morality. Rather than transcending society your example is more analogous to a chicken and egg problem.
@@rath60 "Context Free Morality" 😂😂 If there was ever one! You'd think Chomsky would've been the one to have found or invented it! Given his invention of Context Free Grammar!
The view: you adopt morals from observing your culture, AKA the set of behaviors you observe from those around you, making moral values universal in some regard. Despite what extremists believe, moral disagreements can be debated and you don't have to scream at each other.
One of the questions I would ask is whether or not all moral progress is good progress. Could we actually make a regression that we now view as progress?
@@atayo490 Changes to homosexual rights could be an interesting example, but there are several aspects to it. For one a legal decriminalization and more equal rights, but also a general shift away from the moral view that it is wrong and sinful towards it being normal and morally right.
I want to ask something that is unclear to me. The following is my understanding of what Chomsky says. It maybe incorrect. Chomsky- there are innate structures which constrain moral behavior. extreme moral relativism- there are no such constraints on moral behavior; it can vary "freely". Chomsky claims that extreme moral relativism is in contradiction but i do not understand his argument. Really all I think he says is since moral behavior is constrained and moral relativism claims it isn't, that then moral relativism is contradictory. So he is seemingly(to me) begging the question. Can someone explain his argument? I don't think the eyesight analogy even makes sense. I am not an "extreme moral relativist" but I do appreciate clean argument.
@@evanlavery833 god this was a ways back.... but what i think i was getting at is he doesn't give any justification for the statement "there are innate structures which constrain moral behavior". But instead presents a contradiction which begs the question. That is it assumes his position. I guess he thinks that is just obvious.
I think he is going off of an assumption of some biological bases for morality, due to his “can’t have insect eyes” line of argument. Basically that human brains constrain us to certain human behaviors, outside of which we cannot venture. We cannot have mushroom values, or ant values, or snake values, because we cannot think they way their brains think and understand the way their instincts push them. Thus, we have some sort of “outer extreme” within which we operate that is not constructed but hard-wired (to disagree with po-mo theory). He seems to be saying in his second portion that at least some of this hard-wiring is pro-social behavior, because it can be scientifically replicated in children, lab studies, etc. Probably he would say that conscious choice is a greater determinant of moral progress than unconscious repression (psychoanalysis) or linguistic trickery (po-mo).
@@brendanoshea2936 He definitely does not beg the question here. Chomsky says we are constrained by biology in morality as much as in our physical senses. The moral relativist will say that we learn our morality from culture, therefore morality is only constrained by the culture. But Chomsky argues that it is the other way around. He says we acquire morality from culture as we acquire any other skill and our biological basis for morality determines culture. Could you learn to speak if you were a cat? Could you learn to do math as a dog? You are human. That is what allows you to do these things. You are human. You have a biological disposition on your morality. If you were a human child in an alien culture with an alien morality, the morality would remain alien to you. That is the strength of his argument, he then expounds with the examples of slavery, oppression of women and homosexuals and his argument gets weaker I think. Moral relativism was used to justify these institutions in their time, but that failed and lead to "progress." Progress is the moving of culture towards biological norms of human morality. Therefore, culture is deterministic of morality and not the other way around. Near the end, the others challenge him on whether he considers other cultures who have not progressed as much as Western culture to be primitive, in other words. Chomsky says yes in so many words. He says there have been studies of children from various cultures that hint at a universal morality that is shared among all humans. Therefore the Western views of liberation of women and tolerance of homosexuals are universal. These cultures have simply not advanced to this point because of their power structures, but it is inevitable that they will.
@@chazdomingo475 yeah this video is hitting me differently two years later. im not prepared to say he doesn't beg the question but i don't really care right now if he does or doesn't. here are the problems i see now. what sports are possible is constrained by biological factors. can you determine which sport is better than another because of those constraints? Can we say which sport is closer to our nature? a little side note: by introducing any term and its definition you are immediately implying constraints otherwise the term would be meaningless. this is true for the term morality just like every other term. now for whether biology determines morality. the fact that humans are capable of moral argument is obviously a result of the structure of a human being that is like a truism. no one is saying otherwise. what is being questioned is concreteness of ranking the moral systems of different cultures. ranking which sports are better than others seems a quite arbitrary. im not sure how you make the argument that moral systems can be ranked any more convincing. well not from the angle chomsky is taking. to sum up: granting our specific biological disposition brings morality into human life does not imply that there is a way to rank moralities and chomsky seems to think it does and im not sure he makes any argument for it. if an absolute morality drives culture how did we end up with such different cultural norms? interesting post friend. thanks for writing it. im not really attached to any of the ideas written above just some thoughts.
Nearly everyone can be brilliant. It's quite easy. Isolate yourself and brood. Think about things systematically and keep reducing things to simpler schema. Let thought experiments become your way of life. Question everything you are told and observe.
19:43 The direction is towards more tolerance and variation and more opposition to coercion and control. It doesn’t mean we tolerate everything. We have to discern. Don’t want false equivalence.
