Jarhyn said:
No matter how many bald assertions you make, those assertions will not actually make what you say true. You sound like Derec, Trausti, Metaphor, or Angelo.
3 out of 4 are correct much more often than you are. The arguments I am using here are pretty different from any of the points I've seen them make - but often their assessments are clearly correct, and yours are clearly wrong. Well, 3 out of 4; 1 is usually wrong.
Jarhyn said:
"Assessments" without an argument behind them are what is known as an assertion.
No, those are different things. But that is not the point. You seem to think argument is needed to back up any claims. Obviously, if that were the case, you would get infinite regress of arguments. There is such thing as the probability (not numerical, but approximate and intuitive) that it is proper to assign to a statement, claim, etc. When you make assessments that fly on the face of ordinary moral faculties, they are very, very improbable. And you are doing that.
However, I actually did give arguments:
1. I appealed to the moral sense of readers. Not yours, obviously, since it is failing due to ideology. But that is a human faculty they can use to assess what is just and what is not. That's a rational way of making moral assessments.
2. I provided empirical evidence from widespread human behavior. When people are morally outraged and demand justice, they demand usually that the perpetrators be punished for what they did. That is part of the human moral faculty. It's a feeling of
moral outrage, which is accompanied by the intuitive assessment that what the perpetrators did was immoral and that they deserve to be punished accordingly.
Jarhyn said:
Whine, kick, cry all you want over the fact that you have not justified your beliefs with reason, but you haven't. Is does not create ought. If you knew even the first thing about ethical philosophy you would understand that.
The human moral sense is what it is. And of course, oughts follow from is. It is immoral of you to try to destroy the human moral faculty (even if you fail to realize that you are doing that). It follows that you ought not to do that. Even if my assessment were incorrect (which it is not), that would show that a moral 'ought' follows from an is, at least as long as the 'is' is 'is immoral'.
But this is not a relevant matter. The point is that by assessing the matters normally, using their sense of right and wrong, humans reckon that some other humans deserve to be punished for what they did. You are going up against the human moral sense. The burden is on you. Again, if I point at a leaf that looks green to an ordinary human eye and I say it's green, but you tell me it's not green, well I would ask you to give the argument. I'm going with ordinary human moral assessments, as shown by observing how human monkeys behave. You condem ordinary human morality.
Jarhyn said:
It's literally my job to look at systems and figure out what is going wrong, what adjustments they need, how they fall away from a functional model. Plenty of people operate on pure "moral intuition" and plenty of such people are complete and utter monsters.
Of course it is useful to think about a situation, who did what, consequences to be expected, etc. But in the end, the proper way of making moral assessments is to use one's intuitive sense of right and wrong. What else? Argument? From premises? How do you justify the premises? You put the cart before the horses.
Jarhyn said:
You have done no such thing. If human morality was so functional, we wouldn't have needed ethical philosophy in the first place. Or laws. Literally NOTHING in the universe operates in the way our ignorant intuitions would immediately suggest. Not from the biggest things, to the smallest. We are always wrong either in subtle or grand measure. Always.
When a philosopher comes up with a theory, there is one way to test it:
see whether its predictions are true, while assessing them by means of the human moral sense.
If human morality were so dysfunctional, then ethical philosophy would be useless,
because we would lack the means to tell whether a theory is correct. Philosophers come up with radically different theories. If the human moral sense is not the tool to test them , then
there is no tool to test them, barring internal inconsistency, or false nonmoral predictions.
Jarhyn said:
More bald assertions, equivocation, begging the question.
No, that's a common usage of the terms. It's the most common usage. And in any event, it's what I meant by unethical. The same as immoral.
Jarhyn said:
As I have pointed out, it is ridiculous to think that a mechanism that sprouted from selection pressures in the Paleolithic, before behavior modification, psychology, before secure prisons, before education, before the written word, before formal logic, before math or even consistent spoken language is somehow an accurate model of what is best for us to do with regards to when people behave badly.
As I have pointed out, the mechanism that sprouted from selection pressures in the Paleolithic, before behavior modification, psychology, before secure prisons, before education, before the written word, before formal logic, before math or even consistent spoken language
is our human moral sense; we do not have access to moral knowledge without it. Furthermore, moral terms track what it tracks
Don't you realize? Monkeys have a moral sense, and some other faculties. Monkeys become smart enough to talk. So, monkeys use words to talk about what they care, which is the verdicts of their faculties. Like, they talk about illness and health, about colors, about females and males, and about justice and injustice, right and wrong, and so on.
Jarhyn said:
Let me spell this out for you in a way you won't understand but a six year old probably would: there are two concepts at discussion here, morality and ethics.
Look at what you did. I used the word "unethical" and you then attacked my usage of the word. If you want to use them to mean something else, that does not affect my points.
Jarhyn said:
Morality is the way we feel about "what is right". It is in fact a cluster of systems, a set of early believed concepts passed on in society and deeper emotional structures that provide a "suggestion" of how to act to solve problems with regards to interpersonal conflict. The earlier part comes from traditions and rules of a form our brains are "primed" to accept as truth, and the later comes from the selective pressures of the Paleolithic era. Note that evolution does not target optimal solutions, merely 'functional enough' solutions.
Ethics, on the other hand, are an academic and philosophical modeling of the optimal strategies for interpersonal conflict resolution and behavior.
I, on the other hand, do not use your terminology. I use "immoral" and "unethical" to mean the same thing, and that is what human monkeys mean by those words if they speak English and are engaging in moral assessments - or ethical assessments, which is the same, i.e., assessing whether something is immoral, morally permissible, just, unjust, etc.
Jarhyn said:
A serial killer who feels sex is immoral and punishment is moral is acting in a perfectly "moral" way to murder prostitutes.
No, the serial killer in question has a malfunctioning sense of right and wrong, and is making a mistaken assessment. Usually, serial killers have other motivations by the way.
Jarhyn said:
But it isn't very ethical.
Sure, it's unethical=immoral. He believes his behavior is morally praiseworthy and/or obligatory (I do not know enough about your scenario), but it is not.
Jarhyn said:
He could use his reason to see why his action against the consent of others is not reasonable or rational, but he does not.
No, he could not, unless his sense of right and wrong tells him so. Aliens from another planet might visit the Earth and hunt humans for fun, and there is nothing irrational about it per se (it might depending on their own minds). The word "reasonable" already invokes a moral component. But the aliens might as well be amoral. And the serial killer is irrational because he fails to realize, observing the behavior of others, studying evolution, etc., that his own sense of right and wrong is failing.
Jarhyn said:
He is a slave to his emotional morality that drives him to kill prostitutes, much like you recommend others act as slaves to their primitive, base moral instincts.
What you want is to destroy part of human morality. But you do not realize it.
Jarhyn said:
Of course, I fully expect you to say "well, their .orality is 'broken', but you won't provide me anything to justify that view, except an appeal to the mean. While I can, if you would like, actually point to the mechanism, a framework of principles and understanding that create a reason why asymmetrical ethical systems (and moral machineries) are a problem, and the underlying mechanisms of reality and how they imply, in the presence of a goal, a strategy to accomplish the goal in a way that is possibly symmetrical (as opposed to mere morals).
The main goal of punishing the guilty is...punishing the guilty. It's an end in an of itself. There might be further goals, like protecting society. But it's still, on its own, a goal. Given by our own sense of right and wrong. Our moral sense. Whatever you mean by "assymetrical ethical systems", there is a human morality, and you are trying to break it.
Jarhyn said:
Our game is not "evolve better, kill the weak or 'evil' to remove from gene pool".
Of course not the weak or "evil". But rather, kill the evil (no quotation marks), if he's evil enough to deserve execution. Else, beat him up, or imprison him, etc., depending on what he did and the availability of punitive means.
Jarhyn said:
Of course, the proof of that pudding is in the Nordic model, where these principles lead to lower recidivism, better outcomes for rehabilitated persons, and a more peaceful society at large.
Of course, they too engage in retributive actions all the time, as they are humans. But when the do not, that results in injustice. Now, perhaps you could argue that injustice - in the form of letting the perpetrator get away with it and also prevent the victim and others from inflicting revenge - is still justified in order to protect the innocent. But that would be a very different argument.
Jarhyn said:
You made a claim: "revenge is just".
Misquote, and gross misrepresentation of my claims. Retribution is a significant part of morality. But not all forms of revenge are just. Obviously.
Jarhyn said:
I've been asking you to prove it with more than "I and my buddies really fucking like it!"
That is unreasonable. Imagine I point at a leaf that looks green to an ordinary human eye under ordinary light conditions and I say it's green, but you tell me it's not green, well I would ask you to give the argument. The rational assessment is that it is almost certainly green, barring significant evidence to the contrary.
Similarly, you are saying that all of the instances of retribution that look just to the ordinary human moral sense under ordinary social conditions, are unjust. The rational assessment is that your claim is vastly improbable. You would have to give evidence to the contrary. But you are just massively missing the point.
Jarhyn said:
In the mean time, I point to the reality of better outcomes when we use non-retributive justice, the reality of the implications of neo-lamarckian ethical game theory, the logic of utilitarian goal planning.
No, you are not pointing to the reality of better outcomes. You are claiming that an outcome is better, without explaining why it is so (which, obviously, one can only assess by means of the moral sense!!). I can tell you in which ways it is not better: it is
unjust. The very fact that people who deserve punishment are not getting punished is something that makes the outcome worse all other things equal. Now, you might argue it's still overall better. But that would not make retribution unjust.
Jarhyn said:
Of course I make claims that fly in the face of your bald assertions. Your analogy is cute, but has no bearing. I am doing nothing of the sort. You are pointing at a particle and saying "the electron is HERE, orbiting in this circle", and I am saying "elecrons are not in a location in that way, they are everywhere an nowhere in the probability curve defined by an election shell by a specific equation, though mostly in this area, in the same way that when I throw craps, you cannot say what number the dice are on until they have settled; the are not yet on the table though the probability curve falls around a mean of 7" and you say 'that flies in the face of how I and others understand things to exist at all, if the electron is real it must be somewhere and this is how it is" and I say "sorry, you are wrong, your understanding is wrong, your model is wrong, you can look at it in this way to see how you are wrong."
No, that is not remotely what is happening. Humans do not have an electron-detecting sense. We do have a moral sense, as we have color vision.
Jarhyn said:
I absolutely condemn ignorant human morality because ignorant human morality is flawed, from the moment we pop out to the moment we end in the grave, in the same way I reject the planetary atomic model, and accept quantum mechanics as a system (among rejection of all other manner of intuitive but WRONG assumptions in society and human nature).
Morality is human morality. Aliens would not have morality, as they would not have color vision. They might have an analogue color* vision, and morality*, but those would be different things (well, if the universe is large enough some will be like us, but that's not what should be expected in the observable universe, but different things).
The human moral sense, like human color vision, is not perfect. But it both informs what we actually mean by moral/color terms, and is our guide to finding moral/color truth. You are going up against justice. And you're also going up against the windmills. Again, barring massive genetic engineering, you cannot eliminate this feature of human morality. And you can't even suppress it barring a dictator AGI or something like that.