. . . in Portland that is, where I’m in the capable hands of philosopher Peter Boghossian at Portland State University, host for half of my visit. We’ve already dined at one of the famous “food trucks” (stalls, really) that fill this food-loving city, and had a great Thai lunch. The evidence is below.
Portland is, as always, lovely, and it’s sunny today: the city is experiencing what the locals call a “heat wave,” in which everyone suffers greatly when temperatures climb into the 80s (Fahrenheit!), but it’s not bad at all. It’s a city of food, craft beer, legal marijuana, and fantastic surroundings, and I’ll do my best to have fun until I return to Chicago Sunday afternoon.
Over lunch I learned about Peter’s new app, which is out in some places. It’s apparently designed to help nonbelievers rebut every possible argument for religion and superstition, and I’ll give more details when it’s released in the U.S.
We also had an animated discussion about whether moral values can be objective. Peter says “yes” (as, of course, does Sam Harris), but I disagree, though I’m willing to be convinced. I asked Peter to tell me the objective answer to these questions: “How many monkey lives is it worth taking to develop a vaccine that will protect 100,000 humans? How about if it were rats?”
I argue that judging the “well being” of animals is something that we’ll almost certainly never be able to do for most species, as it depends on their degree of consciousness and whether they feel pain and pleasure as qualia. So how do we objectively answer such questions, or those involving any such tradeoffs, even if we do take “well being” as the currency of moral value?
Discussion to be continued. Meanwhile, here’s Peter and his teaching assistant Christine in front of the row of food trucks we visited:
I look forward to hearing the results of the conversation about the objectivity of human morals (or otherwise). For myself, I don’t see a reason to decide a priori that objective answers to questions like the monkey/rat one can’t be objectively determined even though we haven’t a clue as to how to do it at this point.
For an answer to count as objective (in my view), it would have to be one that a Klingon, or Lt. Data, or the Borg Collective could arrive at independently.
It may be that all of those disparate entities could agree that given a full understanding of human psychology, we could predict with accuracy how humans will typically answer such questions. But that doesn’t make the answers any less subjective than, say, our opinions about popular movies (which might also be predictable under the postulated theory). Only the agreed-upon facts undergirding the theory are objective in any meaningful sense.
The observation that an opinion might be predictable or even universal does not elevate the content of that opinion to the status of objective fact.
That’s a good way to put it. And I wonder if evil doesn’t exist out there as a thing then how does morality or goodness or creepiness or toilet paper orientation. Well that last one does.
Hey, within a span of a couple of months, Jerry visits my home town and my adopted city, 8000 miles apart.
What was his reply?
I agree with you that there is no such thing as objective morality. Indeed, I think the quest for objective morality just misunderstands what morality actually is, and it surprises me that moral realism is still the majority opinion among academic philosophers.
We’re not done disussing the issue. . .
Consider throwing in the red meat suggestion that not only is morality subjective, but the naturalistic fallacy isn’t wholly fallacious, either.
It would be hard to see, for example, a sentient plant deriving the ought that omnivory and carnivory are morally acceptable from first principles. We derive our ethics on killing animals for food from the fact that we have to – an ‘is.’ Take away our need to do it, and the bottom drops out on why it’s a morally or ethically acceptable to kill things that feel pain.
Another example: it would be hard to see why a species of sentient spider would share our morality on child-rearing or child-bearing. Our ‘oughts’ derive from the “is” that we biologically bear few offspring, we depend on a relatively high % of them surviving for propagation, and we must care for them. To the spider, it would likely be morally acceptable to eat a few babies as they skitter away; an ‘ought’ derived from their ‘is’ of many offspring, very low % expected to survive to adulthood, and no care being required.
Not all ‘oughts’ come rationally from ‘is’s.’ But its really hard to imagine or defend the position that none of them are or that none of them should come from that basis. And biology being species-specific, that would imply that morality is always at least somewhat subjectively dependent on the species doing the moralizing.
Coel – I believe that you once wrote a good blogpost of why objective morality is bonkers, eh? To me, the term is an oxymoron.
Yes, and if you add a hydrogen atom it
becomes a hydroxymoron.
sub
Here’s a more abstract question.
Aliens come to earth, have cures for every disease known to us. Problem: thousands of years ago, when the aliens were really mean, they took out whole planets (>billions) of people working out how to make these vaccines. Do we take their knowledge?
That’s easy. Knowledge exists. Use it.
Were they attractive people?
OK – that made me spit my coffee
Sadly, to some “people” (I use the term in a loose, anatomical and phylogenetic sense; I doubt any such could persuade me to breed with them), that is an important point.
I asked the same question at the end of the movie Jupiter Ascending (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ascending). What would Jupiter do with the knowlegde of havesting youth serum from human beings on earth? The allure of staying young!
On my list of worst films!
Lucky, sunshine on your first day.
Cool! I live 3 blocks from those food carts. And having Jerry in town & speaking is right up there with the times when Dawkins and Hitch visited here. Look forward to your talk on Free Will. I’ve got secular friends on both sides of that lively debate, while I sit comfortably in the middle!
Morality is objective in the way that fear is objective and subjective in the way that fear is subjective. The instinct of fear is virtually the same (objective) in all of us. But what particular things we fear depends on the individual’s perception of reality. I believe morality is very much the same. The underlying instinct is virtually objectively the same in all of us but it’s manifests in different behaviours (subjectivity) based on the individual’s perception of reality. The subjective appearance of morality is actually subjective perception of reality more than it is subjective moral instinct.
The more we are on the same page in perception of reality, the more our moral instincts will seem to be objectively the same for the most part. At least for the most important things.
PS: The existence of psychopaths which are anomalous not representative sometimes throws people in this discussion because psychopaths so often achieve prominence, power and influence. This can give the illusion that human nature is worse and more divergent than it actually is.
Objective does not mean “universal”, rather it means (OED):
“Not dependent on the mind for existence”, or “not influenced by personal feelings or opinions …”.
Fear is thus subjective, since if you switched your brain off the fear would not be there.
The fact that it might be similar in all of us is irrelevant. If every child on the planet liked chocolate their liking for chocolate would still be just as subjective as if only one child liked it.
Some would argue that morality is objective because it exists independently of any particular mind, but not of all minds. Money is sort of the same way. Money exists because humans claim that certain pieces of paper or metal have a property. And it can be determined independently whether the property (including the essentiality of origin often adopted these days) is present without appeal to a mind (like with any property like electric charge or hardness or whatever), so it is objective in that sense.
Searle (who I think is crazy-out-there in philosophy of mind) is IMO more or less correct here that there are objective, yet mind-origin-dependent properties. Then one has to ask further, whether ethical properties (if there are such – this may be the wrong metaphysical category – Kitcher thinks so, after a fashion) are examples of this sort of objective property.
(I for one have not come to an opinion yet, because Kitcher’s book made me rethink whether there are ethical *properties* at all.)
And people wonder why metaphysics is important! 😉
But under such a scheme virtually everything would be objective.
Chocolate would be objectively delicious, since you can find more than one person who thinks so. Sunsets would be objectively beautiful, since you can find more than one person who thinks so.
The only things that would be “subjective” would be attitudes held by only one human out of 7 billion!
No, because these are still *individual* in the relevant way. The social system aspect is important. Now, if you’re a social individualist [like Margaret Thatcher, for example] you deny that there *are* social systems. I happen to think there are, but it is a point of debate, after a fashion all the same.
(Admittedly one also needs to show which things are social and which are individual, but ethics is often taken for granted to be about relations to others.)
I agree that both money and morality exist as real social phenomena. Applying the outsider test, we can reasonably surmise that alien anthropologists studying humanity would come to the same conclusion.
However it seems doubtful that these hypothetical aliens would agree with the specific dollar values that humans (individually or collectively) assign to various commodities. (“$1200/ounce for gold? Seriously?”) Nor are they likely to agree with many of the specifics of our consensus morality.
What this says to me is that while the existence of morality as a social phenomenon is an objective fact, the truth value of any specific moral claim is not. The best we can say is that human consensus holds certain claims to be true, for reasons dependent on the contingent facts of our psychology and evolutionary history.
I think there is an argument to be made that one can have a rational and well-founded subjective judgment that involves the consideration of objective evidence. But that’s not the same thing as saying morality is objective. “I have a good argument behind my belief that murder is wrong” is not equivalent to “I can point my goodometer at an act of murder, and register the evilness in it.” There are no goodometers and never will be, because there is no objective evilness to measure. There is no moral quanta or property of systems analogous to mass or velocity or other actually objective properties.
Searle would (if he applied his view to ethics, which I am not sure he does) say that there are objective answers to questions like “does this create social dysfunction”, etc. This is often expressed as analogous to disease or other body malfunction. (And the other way around, as it happens.)
I don’t think we can arrive at an objective answer about killing monkeys, but what about killing people? It seems we can at least get closer to an objective answer on that one if we define a particular scenario.
Variants on Trolley Car. Not long ago Mathew Cobb talked about AI and cars driving themselves. Consider a car that must swerve to avoid a child, but also realized an old lady will get smashed. What does the car do? In truth we can have enormous amounts of data to tell the car what to do. Surveys of people, question to kids, questions to old ladies, coupled with other utilitarian vs. libertarian models. All of this can be decided in a heartbeat, faster than any human can make a decision (and without the human, directly). That’s objective.
If somebody wrote a web bot to automatically generate Trumpisms, would that make Trump’s political philosophy objectively correct? I don’t think so, and I don’t see how your automated car is any different. It’s still just executing a decision procedure programmed into it by some human who subjectively preferred this particular algorithm over the alternatives.
But for the trolley car problem and its variants, most people say they would act a certain way indicating that they will value multiple lives over one, but will not want to take any action if they have to personally kill someone to save others.
We may not have a fully objective example of morality here, but it is a pretty consistent one.
I would say what we have here are objective, reproducible facts about the kinds of moral opinions that humans tend to hold. I don’t think that justifies saying that the opinions themselves constitute objective moral truths.
Exactly.
I suspect Trump’s motivations are not objective, therefore a bot that passes a Trump Turing test will also have to be recalcitrant at best otherwise it would fail.
I recall the discussion, and don’t really wish to re-open it. But generally such problems make an either – or of the two options, when for most semi-realistic autonomic car situations a third alternative exists : suicide for the car (and death for the driver/ car instructor) by impacting a solid object. (If there are no solid objects around, swerving options increase hugely, negating the thought experiment.
I’ll give that one a bit more thought. But I doubt early autonomous vehicles would have the speed / stored energy to make the situation relevant.
I could also program a computer to evaluate beauty based on a host of calculable factors. Symmetry is one that is often invoked. Does that make beauty an objective property? Most people would say no; aesthetics is pretty much the definitional/exemplar example of a subjective judgment.
IMO the two sides are often talking past each other. To me it seems that the “morality is objective” crowd is most often trying to make the point that morality does not have to be personal in nature, arbitrary, or capricious. It can be systematic, based on valid reasoning from a set of uncontroversial premises, and so on.
All of which is true. Meanwhile the “its subjective” crowd is trying to make the point that moral evaluations do not refer to any external, independent property of the system analogous to mass or velocity. Which is also true.
Personally, I think the ‘subjective’ label fits best. Not the least because of the large amount of ridiculous counterexamples that would be produced if we equated ‘objective property’ with a systematized or heuristic-based evaluation. That’s too broad a definition, it lets too much into the ‘objective’ category – at least to my way of thinking.
If someone killed a baby in the forest, and no one was around to care, would it be wrong?
What if a tree fell on the baby, but the tree was caused to fall by fracking hundreds of kilometers away. It depends, I think, on how good the baby’s lawyer is.
Come on! We’re atheists. The question is how good does the baby taste?
Ha ha! Or how tender is the baby? And what wine goes best with it?
Dam. Kelskye got the Chianti.
If evolution is true, why don’t teenagers transmit their tiny, perfectly spelling fingertips back to their parents? Answer me that, Evilutionists!
Did it suffer? But mostly did it put a psychopath in our midst?
By every standard of human decency, yes, but the universe itself is utterly indifferent.
I think you mean “the rest of the universe”. We are, after all, also part of it.
And the family dog might also care be upset.
Indeed so.
A fine Chianti. Whatever that means.
Gastronomes Я Not Us.
“Every” standard of human decency? Josef Mengele may have done LD-50 tests on teenage twins, but I’ve not heard that he beat his wife (at least, with no rod thicker than his thumb). Which means that he had some standard of decency. Not your standard, probably. But a standard nonetheless.
Not every human’s standard (otherwise, there’d be no such thing as normative ethics), but by pretty much every standard we’ve come up on when we reflect on what we ought (and ought not) to do.
The most universal moral precept I know is that of Hillel: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. Is that an objective statement?
I think so. Though I admit that as soon as these discussions (and also those on free will) gain depth, I quickly push Back and scroll down to the nearest Hili.
Unlike free will etc, I think the question of whether morality is objective can be answered. (I am just not sure what the answer is yet, but I suspect the answer is no.) The silver rule is a great ethical principle, but if someone denies its truth, can anyone prove them wrong factually?
Strictly speaking this is an epistemic matter, not an ontological one. For example, until microscopes were invented, the least components of living things (cells) could not be detected. If someone prior to the invention of the microscope claimed that living things came in little bits, themselves alive but dependent on the living system as a whole (mostly), they’d be right, though there would have been no warrant for believing them.
Jerry, be warned, what you are experiencing is not typical Oregon spring weather–April showers typically every day through April and May
Liked the sign in the photo. It translates as “fat person special”
I suppose it’s important to distinguish what’s meant by objective. Because objective can be in respect to rather than be about truth. In a utilitarian framework, it’s objectively wrong to torture animals for no particular reason. But there is no objective reason to prefer utilitarianism over moral nihilism. There are plenty of instrumental reasons to prefer utilitarianism over moral nihilism, including basic facts about how we think. But I don’t think there will ever be an objective argument for an objective framework. Morality is just too much an instrumental endeavour for that.
Are you scheduled for a book signing at Powell’s Books?
Subjective.
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
Shakespeare…
Hi Jerry,
I agree that moral values can’t be “objective”, though I think a better way to put it is to say that moral claims (like “Action A is morally wrong”) can’t be true.
However, I think it’s a mistake to concentrate on the fuzziness of “well-being”. After all, it seems reasonably objective to say that feeding a thousand starving people creates more well-being than feeding just one of those people, other things being equal. So, if there’s no other objection to moral truth, it would seem to be true that choosing to feed a thousand starving people rather than just one is the morally right thing to do.
My objection to moral truth goes deeper. It’s in the nature of moral language that moral claims can’t be true.
The primary function of moral language is not to inform but to influence behaviour. And the effectiveness of the consequent behaviour is not dependent on our moral beliefs being true. If I believe that murder is morally wrong and consequently refrain from a murder I would otherwise have committed, the social and other benefits of that restraint are the same regardless of whether my belief is true. Contrast this with beliefs about the world, where false beliefs are liable to result in less effectiveness in our interaction with the world.
Given that no one has been able to make sense of moral truth, and that the concept of moral truth is not needed for explaining anything, the parsimonious conclusion is that there’s no such thing. The only evidence for moral truth is our instinctive intuition that some moral claims are true.
Asking “can moral values be objective?” or similar just seems to be the wrong question.
When we know vastly more than we currently do, will we be able to come up with objective moral values? Who knows? Why try to pre-judge the answer when we are centuries away from knowing whether we even can answer it?
A much more interesting question is “can we come up with at least some moral values that are at least a bit more on the road to objectiveness than those we currently have?”. Probably using scientific methods and principles.
To which the answer is almost certainly “Yes, so let’s get on with doing it.”
The objective label seems like a red herring. Consensus morality is the way to go, I think. Death panels are needed to tell us what is moral.
For life forms of every kind, Evolution has slowly filtered out the “fitter”, by pitting member against member, group against group, species against species in a continuous fight for survival. Not only on the basis of effective advantages of physique, but also on effective advantages of behavior. It has selected, for humans, an upright posture on two legs; arms with hands and opposable thumbs; big brains; along with many innate behavioural attributes, pain warnings, fears, etc. It has also selected innate and cultural social care for offspring and other human group-members and other such conducts which are advantageous to our societal species. These latter I regard as human morality. That is, behaviours which are advantageous to our own species, selected by Evolution itself as “good”. Such behaviour is not a matter of subjective opinion but objective selection. We may not have the ability to decide whether it is better to save one or five humans or sacrifice a 100,000 monkeys/rats, -but evolutionarily there is an objective answer to such moral enigmas. We may each behave according to our subjective morality but our species survival depends on that behaviour being objectively “fit”.
My definition: Objective Morality for a species (and its individual members) is behaviour that will be found to be evolutionarily viable behaviour for that same species: Objective Immorality is the opposite. Of course, if/when/as circumstances change then probably so will relavent morality. It always depends on circumstances: it is neither universal nor unchanging.