The Great Contradiction

[ruby sparks]

I think you're missing how minuscule the rate of errors is vs. the rate of success.

See my above post. It is one thing to say that the number of times we manage to navigate the world successfully is large, but it is another to say that we do it with a correct intuitive understanding of what is actually happening or what the world actually is.

Also, regarding color, sometimes you are mistaken at first, but in order to find out the color, you still rely on your color vision

Of course, 'in the end' we must rely on our faculties, that is obvious, but we are talking here about intuitions, the 'at first' things, since that is often what we go by when we navigate the world minute by minute.

Alright, so two points:

First, figuring out moral facts about actual behavior of people is often complicated by insufficient or erroneous information. For example, if you take a look at moral debates, at least in the vast majority of cases you will find that when there are moral disagreements, the people who disagree are giving different inputs to their respective moral senses, as they have different beliefs (or intuitive probabilistic assessments, more generally) about the nonmoral facts (i.e., described in nonmoral terms) relevant to moral assessments.
But being apparently more complicated does not seem to be strong evidence that there are no moral facts.

Second, why do you think morality does not exist outside people's head, in a relevant sense?
I mean, there is a sense in which morality only exists in the heads of people (or chimps, etc.), namely, people and some other species are moral agents, some are morally good, some are morally bad, etc. That sense, however, is not relevant to whether there is a fact of the matter. For example, there is a fact of the matter as to whether, say, McConnell believes that Jesus rose from the dead. Sure, it's a statement about McConnell's mind, but regardless of whether we can figure it out, there is a fact of the matter. Similarly, there is a fact of the matter as to whether he is a good or a bad person - or just morally mediocre -, and how much. Or at least, that would be the standard, default position. What I'm not sure about is why you think otherwise. I mean, sure, we are talking about people's minds, but we make statements of fact about people's mind all the time, e.g., we talk about whether they are Christians of one kind or another, or YECs, or Muslims, or Marxists, or have OCD, or are psychopaths, and so on. So, there are facts of the matters about things in people's heads, as there are facts of the matter about things that are not in people's heads.

Let me tell you this: long ago, I actually used to think something like that too - namely, that there was no fact of the matter, and/or was subjective. I was mistaken, iirc mostly as a result of a mistaken evaluation of the amount of disagreement (or 'divergence' I should perhaps say), and partly as a result of having a mistaken theory about the meaning of some expressions. Maybe if you tell me why you think that - contrary to ordinary intuitions - you are talking about something that it is only in your head (or similar in other people's heads), I might give a more targeted argument.


Third, if you are talking about moral concepts like moral wrongness, permissibility, etc., you are correct that it is not exactly the same in other people's heads, barring a remarkable coincidence that I have a doppelganger right down to neuron level (well, you do if the universe is large enough, but we may ignore that in this context). However, the same is true of all other concepts. In other works, barring such remarkable coincidence, your concept of 'red' is not exactly the same as mine, and neither is your concept of a cat, or a dog, or a even Marxist (e.g., how similar do a person's ideas have to be to Marx's to qualify? There are surely slight differences between competent English speakers, regardless of how well they understand Marx). That, however, is not a problem for our successful communication, or for there being facts of the matter about all of those things (and this is why I made some room for slight variations when I described species-wide traits). So, it doesn't look like it should be a problem for morality.

Thank you for all that. I am willing to entertain it. I think the best way to explore it further might be through a specific example, and we were doing killing Jews?

I particularly like how you explained that something can be said to factually, and possibly even 'universally' exist (be endemic to properly-functioning human species) even if it is only in the heads of humans. That made me think. You used some interesting examples. The one that occurred to me was pain. We can't point to pain in the world outside and yet it would seem incorrect to say that it's not real and not 'universal' (in the sense we are using). Pain, as something to compare to morality, might even work better for my understanding of what you are saying because unlike colour there is no external referent to cause confusion about whether the thing we are talking about is 'out there' or 'in here'.

Point taken.

1. Most of the time, you do not have time to pause and consider.
2. Even more importantly, when you do pause and consider, you are relying all the time on intuitions. You may be questioning one intuition or a few, using many more instances of intuitions to do so, and without even realizing it. It would be proper to isolate a specific intuition, but again, the general, standard, default case is to trust them.

Hm. Let me work out how to reply to this.

Navigating the world successfully is different from doing it for the actual reasons or in the actual way you think you are doing it, or the way you think the world is working. Example: humans navigated the world well by thinking that the sun rose in the morning and went down in the evening, over a flat earth.

How much that and other similar examples might matter might depend on how skeptical someone is. To me it's a red flag. Yes, like you, I will mostly continue to navigate the world based on my intuitive understandings, but often, in the back of my mind, will be the question, 'am I actually right about this, even if currently, I have no good reason to think I might be?'

Another additional one is that there is so much variety. Should I trust my intuitions, or yours, or his, or hers, or theirs?

Is there?

First, if there were so much variety, social coordination would be nearly impossible, given the results of moral disagreements. There are such disagreements, but they happen in a massive background of agreement.
Second, imagine Alice and Bob disagree about whether the traffic light was red, because he looked at the light 1 second before she did, so different colored light reached their eyes. You would not say that this indicates variety in color intuitions. What happens is that their visual apparatuses got different inputs, so different outputs do not provide evidence against shared intuitions. But now take a look at usual moral debates (e.g., read some of the threads here, in the Political Discussions forum). You will find in nearly all cases that have different inputs. They disagree about whether the people whose behavior they are assessing believed this or that, had this or that intention, etc.
Third, in other cases, people are not using their moral sense. Rather, they are using an unwarranted procedure to get moral beliefs (e.g., faith that an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect creator commands X, or whatever). Now, as you say, sometimes they also use their moral sense to pick and choose, but their assessments are contaminated by an untrustworthy source (a source we also know it is not to be trusted by its assertions on other matters, from the origin of the world to possessed pigs to multiplying bread, etc.).

So, generally (there are exceptions, arguably for psychopaths), you own moral intuitions should be okay. But you should be careful not to replace them by unwarranted sources (like 3), and also not to enter the wrong input, because if you do, you may very well get the wrong output, not due to a failure of your moral sense, but simply because you got the nonmoral facts wrong.

I am not yet at the point where I feel I can agree with that.

First, I am not sure if social co-ordination would be impossible with a great deal of variety. It may be that social co-ordination works despite there being a lot of variety.

Second, agreements, while they might facilitate co-ordination, are not facts. At one time, everyone may have 'universally' agreed that the sun rose and fell over a flat earth.

Apologies for not replying in detail to all of your points.

 

[The AntiChris]

Okay, so I'd like to ask a question too. Earlier in the thread, you said you supported some pragmatic responses to wrongdoing. But now I get the impression you're saying you do not have the intuition that there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not people engage in wrongdoing. Am I getting your position wrong?

Your question is ambiguous.

I think some things people engage in are wrong (shouldn't be done).

I don't think wrongness is a property of people's actions.


It's a fact of the matter that I think some things people do are wrong.

It's not a fact of the matter that things some people do are wrong independent of my opinion (evaluation).

But if there is no fact of the matter as to whether a person behaves wrongfully, then who are the people on which the state is to impose deterrence, incapacitation and/or restoration?

The people who have broken the law.

There is a fact of the matter as to whether someone has broken the law.

Breaking laws is not the same as behaving wrongfully (immorally).

It seems to me you were saying it would be some of the people who behave immorally, but if there is no fact of the matter as to who behaves immorally, then I'm not sure how this proposal might work.

I'm not sure why you're confused.

 

[ruby sparks]

Because....I am not sure if Angra (he can clarify) or anyone is saying that retribution for no reason at all is ok. That is to say, surely (I think) there must be a basis, a reason, even for 'natural justice' if it it subject to natural selection. It might be wrong to say that natural selection has 'reasons' (there is arguably no reasoning going on in blind natural selection) so perhaps we should use the word 'causes'.

There is a big difference between the causes of one of our faculties (e.g., what caused animals like us, with the moral sense we have), and our reasons for acting. Of course, our moral sense, including our intuitive moral sense, have causes. In particular, this resulted from the evolutionary process, and has to do with monkey societies.

Yes. I think it's fairly safe to say that morality, whatever it is, is an evolved trait.

On the other hand, just retribution - justice - is a reason in and of itself. It does not need a further reason. That is what I am saying.

I do not know what you mean by, 'on the other hand'. Morality is an evolved trait. All it's 'reasons' have been naturally selected for. Is there an other hand?

Let me present two scenarios, with some modifications to make them better and address previous concerns:

S1: Aliens abduct Bob and Jack, and abandon them on another planet, where there is life and they can hunt and gather. They made it clear to them that they will never go back to Earth, or contact Earth. They - correctly or not - accept that this is their situation. Bob wants to live on that planet, make the best of a bad situation. Jack pretends to go along, but it turns out that Jack is a serial killer. Jack takes Bob by surprise. He hits him in the head, and when Bob is trying to get up, Jack stabs him repeatedly, and cuts him in many places. He laughs as Bob suffers in a pool of his own blood. But Jack did not know that Bob had a small caliber gun - he just hadn't had time to grab it before Jack fatally wounded him. So, Bob knows he is dying and has no hope of surviving, but before losing consciousness for the last time, with his last breath he pulls his gun and shoots Jack in the chest, in retribution for murdering him (and not for any other reason). After that, Bob loses consciousness, and does not see the effects of the shot. But the bullet goes through the heart, so while it is small, it is enough. A few minutes later, Jack is dead, killed by his last victim Bob.


S2: Aliens abduct Bob and Jack, and abandon them on another planet, where there is life and they can hunt and gather. They made it clear to them that they will never go back to Earth, or contact Earth. They - correctly or not - accept that this is their situation. Bob wants to live on that planet, make the best of a bad situation. Jack pretends to go along, but it turns out that Jack is a serial killer. Jack takes Bob by surprise. He hits him in the head, and when Bob is trying to get up, Jack stabs him repeatedly, and cuts him in many places. He laughs as Bob suffers in a pool of his own blood. But Jack did not know that Bob had a small caliber gun - he just hadn't had time to grab it before Jack fatally wounded him. So, Bob knows he is dying and has no hope of surviving, but before losing consciousness for the last time, with his last breath he pulls his gun and shoots Jack in the chest, in retribution for murdering him (and not for any other reason). After that, Bob loses consciousness, and does not see the effects of the shot. It turns out that when he was abducted, Jack the serial killer was searching for potential victims. As a precaution, and as always, he was wearing a bulletproof vest. The small caliber bullet is nothing. Jack laughs again at his victim's failure to exact retribution - though Bob is unconscious by then so he can't hear Jack. Jack lives out the rest of his life on the planet, alone. But he likes being alone - he hates other people - and he enjoys recalling how he carved up and killed his victims. He gets off recalling how they died, some choking in their own blood, some pleading for mercy.
​

I would say:

The world of S2 is better than that of S1, because it is more just. Bob managed to give Jack some of what he deserved, in retribution for what he did to him. It is also better because Jack did not get to live happily ever after. He got what he deserved - well, part of it at least. Bob did not do anything wrong when he shot at Jack in retribution, in either scenario.

What is your assessment?

Well, obviously, I tend to instinctively agree with you (we are both the same sort of apes after all). But then I wondered.....


S3: Aliens abduct Bob and Jack, and abandon them on another planet, where there is life and they can hunt and gather. They made it clear to them that they will never go back to Earth, or contact Earth. They - correctly or not - accept that this is their situation. Bob wants to live on that planet, make the best of a bad situation. Jack pretends to go along, but it turns out that Jack is a serial killer. Jack takes Bob by surprise. He hits him in the head, and when Bob is trying to get up, Jack stabs him repeatedly, and cuts him in many places. He laughs as Bob suffers in a pool of his own blood. But Jack did not know that Bob had a small caliber gun - he just hadn't had time to grab it before Jack fatally wounded him. So, Bob knows he is dying and has no hope of surviving, but before losing consciousness for the last time, with his last breath he pulls his gun and shoots Jack in the chest, in retribution for murdering him (and not for any other reason). After that, Bob loses consciousness, and does not see the effects of the shot. It turns out that when he was abducted, Jack the serial killer was searching for potential victims. As a precaution, and as always, he was wearing a bulletproof vest. The small caliber bullet is nothing. Jack laughs again at his victim's failure to exact retribution - though Bob is unconscious by then so he can't hear Jack. Jack however, soon gets lonely (he's part of a social species after all). He begins to wonder if it really was a good idea to kill the only other person on the planet. Inside himself, he reforms. We could say he is a better person.


Is S3 not better than S1?

(I think you meant to say S1 was better, not S2)?

 

[ruby sparks]

Given that these images are not on paper, it is debatable what the right instrument to determine color is. But let us say you do this experiment on paper. How do we know that they are the same color? On what do we rely? The answer is: on intuitions. We use our eyes. We just need to put the object in a different place. Sure, under unusual conditions, we might get optical illusions. That does not provide good reasons for generally not trusting our color intuitions, let alone for thinking that there is no fact of the matter about colors.

I think you are using 'intuitions' in a way that is not making an important distinction. Yes, 'in the end', we must use our faculties/senses. But by intuitions, we (or I) mean those 'at (or near) first' instinctive assumptions that form the basis for how we routinely proceed a lot of the time, moment by moment, without (or without much) conscious reasoning and in the face of scenarios as they are presented to us at the time, not as they might be presented with more information.

Also, 'navigating the world pretty well' is not a good guide to understanding the facts. And as I said in an earlier post, understanding the facts is foundational, is bedrock, to understanding everything we think, even if we already navigate quite well without such understandings. We might navigate better with better understandings. We might not, for example, be currently killing each other in huge numbers so often and indeed destroying our own ecosystem to the point of endangering our very survival. A big ask, I know, and I'm not promising anything, but it's the backdrop, and arguably one rather massive caveat/counterpoint to saying stuff like "as a species, we're currently navigating successfully, or even pretty well", isn't it?

Given the immense gravity of the horrible scenarios and predicaments we have created for ourselves, that arguably should not have been one of these: . It arguably should have been one of these:

Again, 'many' is relative. It's a minuscule proportion, for the reasons I've been arguing. And I do not waive relevant evidence away. Rather, I argue that it's a drop in the ocean.

It isn't, not when it comes to the brain stuff that neuro/psych/bio/cognitive science explores, namely how our brain works and our understanding of phenomena such as consciousness, free will, self, perception, etc. All of those are endemically riddled with intuitive misunderstandings. And they involve non-trivial issues, and so should not be readily dismissed as you are doing with them. Intuitive misunderstandings about these things are widespread and run deep into nearly everything we think and do. Please do not be like the person who denies or minimises racism by explaining away every example of it as an isolated incident.

And you may say,"sure, but we seem to be able to navigate the world pretty well nonetheless". And I will say, "yes, but the people who believed entities called demons caused lunacy would have said the same thing that you are now saying". So again, navigating the world pretty well (even if we are doing it; see above giant caveats about endless wars and destroying the planet) has demonstrably not been a good guide to understanding the facts, and there is a case for being inherently more philosophically skeptical, even before a particular intuition is dislodged by evidence, than you seem to be, not least because the dislodging has already started, albeit you are trying to set it aside.

 

[ruby sparks]

There seems to be the sort of consistency in the ordering of the responses there that we might call a 'moral fact' if we mean a moral, human, species-wide 'universal', apparently endemic/consistent, judgemental trait.

However, note that no judgements seem to go above 90% certainty (regarding acceptability of an option) I think, if I'm reading it right. So it is only the relative ordering that is 'universal'.

I'm wondering. Does that mean that we need at least two options to compare before deciding in a way that might be called 'universal' about.....anything in the moral domain, when we get into specific situations?

A few points:

First, these scenarios do not ask whether one of those choices is immoral. Rather.........

Laters.





In the meantime, ponder this (in relation to retribution, and particularly your two previous scenarios S1 & S2 about the two men on the other planet, and indeed possibly my S3):

"An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind".
(Attributed to Mahatma Ghandi)

 

[ruby sparks]

Okay, so I'd like to ask a question too. Earlier in the thread, you said you supported some pragmatic responses to wrongdoing. But now I get the impression you're saying you do not have the intuition that there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not people engage in wrongdoing. Am I getting your position wrong?

Your question is ambiguous.

I think some things people engage in are wrong (shouldn't be done).

I don't think wrongness is a property of people's actions.


It's a fact of the matter that I think some things people do are wrong.

It's not a fact of the matter that things some people do are wrong independent of my opinion (evaluation).

But if there is no fact of the matter as to whether a person behaves wrongfully, then who are the people on which the state is to impose deterrence, incapacitation and/or restoration?
It seems to me you were saying it would be some of the people who behave immorally, but if there is no fact of the matter as to who behaves immorally, then I'm not sure how this proposal might work.

More or less the way it is currently working?

In a world of interacting machines, if one machine damages another machine, the supervisory machines don't necessarily need to make a moral judgement about it. The evidence that it happened would be enough for the supervisory machines to take corrective action.

Or, more realistically, if the machines have a lot of trouble not making moral judgements (because they have evolved to have them) they can at least temper their morally judgemental urges by accepting certain things about the way the machines (including themselves) actually work.

This has arguably already been gradually happening for centuries. Modern, liberal justice is different from ancient tribal or medieval justice, because we now know more things about how our brains actually work (eg mental illnesses and other conditions for example. Even an understanding of genetics is starting to play a role).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I recall reading an article written by a retired judge, one who had had to pronounce the death sentence during his work. He was filled with regret about some of his moral judgements. He came to believe that if he had been born as the criminals he sentenced to death, and gone through literally everything they went through, he too would have ended up doing what they did.

That is not to say that he would not still have imposed a death sentence, but it says that his judgement regarding their supposed immorality would likely have been different (tempered at least).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another example springs to mind, this time about retribution. Gordon Wilson, whose daughter was killed in a bomb explosion in Enniskillen here in my country in 1987, forgave the terrorists who had planted the bomb. And not just years later, but hours later. The next day, and thereafter.

"In an interview with the BBC, Wilson described with anguish his last conversation with his daughter and his feelings toward her killers: "She held my hand tightly, and gripped me as hard as she could. She said, 'Daddy, I love you very much.' Those were her exact words to me, and those were the last words I ever heard her say." To the astonishment of listeners, Wilson went on to add, "But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life".

He later became a prominent peace campaigner.

Was he, regarding eschewing retribution, functioning worse or better than most humans?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

See also: my alien abductees (bob & Jack) scenario S3, and the previous quote attributed to Ghandi.

 

[ruby sparks]

avigating the world successfully is different from doing it for the actual reasons or in the actual way you think you are doing it, or the way you think the world is working. Example: humans navigated the world well by thinking that the sun rose in the morning and went down in the evening, over a flat earth.

How much that and other similar examples might matter might depend on how skeptical someone is. To me it's a red flag. Yes, like you, I will mostly continue to navigate the world based on my intuitive understandings, but often, in the back of my mind, will be the question, 'am I actually right about this, even if currently, I have no good reason to think I might be?'

In the bolded part, I meant to type, "am I actually right about this, even if currently, I have no good reason to think I might not be?"

 

[Angra Mainyu]

This is not just me saying this and it's not going to go away or not be the case just because you deny or try to minimise it.

It is not going to go away, but it is not going to be more than a minuscule proportion of the cases in which our intuitions give us true results, even if you - or even some of the researchers - fail to realize, probably due to the salience of the cases in which some intuitions mislead us, that they are all the time using intuitions that do not fail, even to realize that some of the intuitions are misleading.

Angra, the above is non-trivial. Everything we think we know is based on our brain. Understanding how the brain actually works is as close to getting to bedrock for everything else as is currently possible.

Or is it physics? I'm not sure how to compare them, but sure, understanding the brain is very important for a number of purposes.

Neuro/psych/bio/cognitive science is in some ways the exploration of that other, earlier, very famous attempt to get to philosophical bedrock, 'I think therefore I am'.

I do not see in which sense, but okay, maybe.

In pursuit of the facts about that, intuitions do not cut the mustard.

And here is where you go wrong. Intuitions cut the mustard all the time. Scientists who study the brain rely on intuitions all the time. Even if they test some intuition on some specific cases and realize that those intuitions are mislading us, they are using many more and stronger intuitions in the process, as they:

1. Intuitively apprehend there are instruments around them, colleagues and people who take part in the experiment. They trust their senses all the time to do the experiment (and if the experiment is about some situations in which human senses are misleading, then they still rely on their senses nearly all the time in the process of doing the experiments).
2. Intuitively apprehend that those people have minds too, have beliefs, etc., and of course have intuitions.
3. Intuitively apprehend what happened a few seconds before their present, and a few minutes, and hours, and the previous day, etc, which allow them continuity in their experiment.
4. Intuitively make an epistemic probabilistic assessment to reckon that the experiments show that some particular intuitions are misleading (remember that the results are compatible with infinitely many mutually disjoint hypotheses; intuitively, researches pick one).

 

[Angra Mainyu]

But if there is no fact of the matter as to whether a person behaves wrongfully, then who are the people on which the state is to impose deterrence, incapacitation and/or restoration?

The people who have broken the law.

There is a fact of the matter as to whether someone has broken the law.

Breaking laws is not the same as behaving wrongfully (immorally).

It seems to me you were saying it would be some of the people who behave immorally, but if there is no fact of the matter as to who behaves immorally, then I'm not sure how this proposal might work.

I'm not sure why you're confused.

Okay, let me try to clarify, sorry if it wasn't clear:

Yes, there is a fact of the matter (usually, anyway), and yes, it is not the same. You are correct on both counts. However, earlier you said:-

I think we should do the minimum necessary (where appropriate) to achieve deterrence, rehabilitation, societal protection and restoration. These are all considered, by most, to be forms of punishment but they're not (in my view) "deserved" - they're pragmatic responses to wrongdoing (they're consequentialist reasons for punishment).

You were talking about pragmatic responses to wrongdoing, not pragmatic responses to law breaking. You seemed to be proposing that in order to deal with wrongdoings (not all, but some) someone (an elected government, given another post) should pass laws imposing those pragmatic punishments on certain wrongdoers. It is in this context that I ask my question:

But if there is no fact of the matter as to whether a person behaves wrongfully, then who are the people on which the state is to impose deterrence, incapacitation and/or restoration?

It was a post a while back, so maybe that was not clear. Let me restate the question as follows: But if there is no fact of the matter as to whether a person behaves wrongfully, then what are the behaviors that the state is to ban so that perpetrators are pragmatically punished imposing deterrence, incapacitation and/or restoration?

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Of course, 'in the end' we must rely on our faculties, that is obvious, but we are talking here about intuitions, the 'at first' things, since that is often what we go by when we navigate the world minute by minute.

Intuitions are not only the 'at first' things. The definition I am using is the one you provided, namely:

Intuition: 'the ability to understand or know something instinctively, without conscious reasoning'.
​

It does not matter how long it takes. For example, in order to make a moral assessment, a person might decide to think a lot about something, e.g., who did what, why, etc., but those are nonmoral facts (i.e., facts that can be stated in nonmoral language). But then the person just reckons without conscious reasoning whether the person whose behavior she is assessing, behaved immorally, etc. That is an intuition. And they are all around, not just in the moral domain.

What I'm saying is that even our faculty of conscious reasoning uses intuition all the time to get going. It's an essential feature of conscious reasoning to have also unconscious intuitions allowing the process to continue.

Thank you for all that. I am willing to entertain it. I think the best way to explore it further might be through a specific example, and we were doing killing Jews?

Alright, so what do you have in mind, specifically? The behavior of the Nazis?

For example, here is a common denominator (also seen in some groups in the present) is this: Anti-Jewish propaganda makes all sorts of false assertions against Jews. They would say that Jews want to do such-and-such thing, etc. They do not just say: 'Look, Jews are our out-group, and it is in our interest to go kill them'. Rather, they first demonize Jews, getting people to hate them. They even say they are a different race (not really), to make them look like they are a different sort of being. That was necessary to break the normal human intuition that it is wrong to go and kill people just to take their stuff, or because we do not like the way they looked at us.
Some of the people promoting the propaganda are in the know, and others are also deceived. But the point is that in order to get an ideology of extermination started, it seems you need first to make false claims about the people being targeted. That they are an outgroup does not suffice for most people, I would say save for malfunctioning (some ideologies, however, posit the outgroup as something of a different kind, so essentially they would be painted as sub-humans, but it would be the sub-human part (not to out-group part on its own) that does the trick).

Still, if I am wrong about this, then that would seem to imply that the rule against exterminating others is local, not universal. That would not challenge the existence of moral facts, just my beliefs on this one.

I particularly like how you explained that something can be said to factually, and possibly even 'universally' exist (be endemic to properly-functioning human species) even if it is only in the heads of humans. That made me think. You used some interesting examples. The one that occurred to me was pain. We can't point to pain in the world outside and yet it would seem incorrect to say that it's not real and not 'universal' (in the sense we are using). Pain, as something to compare to morality, might even work better for my understanding of what you are saying because unlike colour there is no external referent to cause confusion about whether the thing we are talking about is 'out there' or 'in here'.

Point taken.

Great, and good example by the way (pain).

Hm. Let me work out how to reply to this.

Navigating the world successfully is different from doing it for the actual reasons or in the actual way you think you are doing it, or the way you think the world is working. Example: humans navigated the world well by thinking that the sun rose in the morning and went down in the evening, over a flat earth.

Yes, true. But while they were mistaken about that, they were right about all sort of things around them, like how tight were the ropes holding the sails in their ship, whether there was an incoming storm, etc.

How much that and other similar examples might matter might depend on how skeptical someone is. To me it's a red flag. Yes, like you, I will mostly continue to navigate the world based on my intuitive understandings, but often, in the back of my mind, will be the question, 'am I actually right about this, even if currently, I have no good reason to think I might be?'

Consider that question you ask. You ask that question because of the examples you have considered. But in the process of doing so, you rely (intuitively; you haven't reasoned your way to it) in your memories. For example, you take as a fact that people used to navigate the world like that. It's okay. It's a fact, and it is proper of you to take it as a fact. But you do so intuitively.

First, I am not sure if social co-ordination would be impossible with a great deal of variety. It may be that social co-ordination works despite there being a lot of variety.

Take a look at moral debates. When people disagree, they tend to intend to do very different things. Some are for X, others are against X. Imagined if that happened in our daily lives. For example, suppose I go to the supermarket, and I put the groceries in the cart, but then someone at the supermarket reckons it's very immoral to put bananas next to yogurt, so he punches me in retribution! Well, that does not happen normally. In general, we do not go after each other for behaviors that other people do not expect to be problematic. That is because the massive background of agreement.

From an evolutionary perspective, what would cause the evolution of a morality in which each has her personal preferences? That would result in unpredictable retributions all around. Monkeys would be at war with each other! But that would not work, and it is not what we observe in other species either.

Second, agreements, while they might facilitate co-ordination, are not facts. At one time, everyone may have 'universally' agreed that the sun rose and fell over a flat earth.

My reply was to the point that there was so much variety. This is a different objection, which requires a different reply. So, I would say:

First, not everyone agreed with that. But most people in some societies did, that is true. Did that help coordinate matters? I do not know that it did. Imagine some people had realized (they probably did) that the Earth was not flat. Would that have made it more difficult to coordinate things? I do not think that's likely.
But generally, yes, sometimes agreements can facilitate coordination, even if it's agreements about false statements - well, sort of, in the examples, they facilitate coordination when compared to disagreements, not to agreements about the actual facts.

However, in any case, this is not a reason to cast doubt about an intuition, or about generally a belief on which there is agreement.

For example, universal agreement about color facilitates coordination. Universal agreement about the existence of other minds surely faciitates coordination. Universal agreement about whether other people can feel pain helps facilitate coordination. But the fact that some agreements about false things sometimes might help facilitate coordination even if they are about false things do not provide good grounds to cast doubt over our intuitions.

In the particular case of morality, however, I would ask the following question: let us say there is a species-wide moral sense (i.e., the agreement in question). How would it come to pass that there are no moral facts? In other words, what else would be needed?

Apologies for not replying in detail to all of your points.

No problem. This is actually getting unmanageably long for me too.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

I do not know what you mean by, 'on the other hand'. Morality is an evolved trait. All it's 'reasons' have been naturally selected for. Is there an other hand?

In that part of my post, I was using 'reason' in a restricted sense. Our moral sense resulted from the evolutionary process, not because God decreed so. If God had decreed so, then presumably he would have had reasons motivating his action. But evolution is not a conscious process, and does not act for reasons - while, of course, there are causes. What I am saying is that when humans act in order to exact just retribution on people for their wrongdoings, that is a reason for acting, and it is a proper reason.

(I think you meant to say S1 was better, not S2)?

Yes, of course. My bad.

Well, obviously, I tend to instinctively agree with you (we are both the same sort of apes after all). But then I wondered.....

Good. This is at least part of what I was arguing for. Humans are the sort of apes that instinctively value the world of S2 better than the world of S1. I would further say it's a better world, a more just world, and so on. But that humans are the sort of apes that do that is enough at least to support my point that my position on just retribution (and my concept of it) is not alien to other apes of the same type I am.

S3: Aliens abduct Bob and Jack, and abandon them on another planet, where there is life and they can hunt and gather. They made it clear to them that they will never go back to Earth, or contact Earth. They - correctly or not - accept that this is their situation. Bob wants to live on that planet, make the best of a bad situation. Jack pretends to go along, but it turns out that Jack is a serial killer. Jack takes Bob by surprise. He hits him in the head, and when Bob is trying to get up, Jack stabs him repeatedly, and cuts him in many places. He laughs as Bob suffers in a pool of his own blood. But Jack did not know that Bob had a small caliber gun - he just hadn't had time to grab it before Jack fatally wounded him. So, Bob knows he is dying and has no hope of surviving, but before losing consciousness for the last time, with his last breath he pulls his gun and shoots Jack in the chest, in retribution for murdering him (and not for any other reason). After that, Bob loses consciousness, and does not see the effects of the shot. It turns out that when he was abducted, Jack the serial killer was searching for potential victims. As a precaution, and as always, he was wearing a bulletproof vest. The small caliber bullet is nothing. Jack laughs again at his victim's failure to exact retribution - though Bob is unconscious by then so he can't hear Jack. Jack however, soon gets lonely (he's part of a social species after all). He begins to wonder if it really was a good idea to kill the only other person on the planet. Inside himself, he reforms. We could say he is a better person.


Is S3 not better than S1?

Good question. Of course, I need to resort to my intuitions to answer it.

But it's not so immediate, and here is my theory about the differences between S1 vs. S2 and S1 vs. S3, that makes the latter more difficult to assess:

In my scenarios (S1 vs. S2), my other goal (apart from the bit about our kinds of apes above) was to argue that just retribution was, in an of itself, a good thing. So, I made scenarios that differed in the amount of just retribution, but which did not differ on the other things that were brought up as competitors in this thread - restoration, isolation, rehabilitation, deterrence. And your verdict is the same as mine.
But S1 vs. S3 is different. In S1 there is more just retribution than there is in S3, no doubt. That is a good thing, so all other (morally relevant) things equal, S1 is better than S3. Yet, not all other morally relevant things are equal. In S3, a wrongdoer reforms, and stops being evil. That is also a good thing all other things equal, and it is a good thing that is not in S1. After further consideration, there appears to be a difficulty with S3: it's not psychologically realistic that a monster like that would reform. That I think is making the matter more difficult to intuitively grasp. But after having contemplated the scenarios for a while longer, it seems to me S1 is still better, because a moral monster gets killed in retribution, rather than getting better. Maybe it would be different with people who are less evil.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

I think you are using 'intuitions' in a way that is not making an important distinction. Yes, 'in the end', we must use our faculties/senses. But by intuitions, we (or I) mean those 'at (or near) first' instinctive assumptions that form the basis for how we routinely proceed a lot of the time, moment by moment, without (or without much) conscious reasoning and in the face of scenarios as they are presented to us at the time, not as they might be presented with more information.

I'm using 'intuitions' as you defined the term (see my previous post). When we reasons consciously, we are not using intuitions only in the, say, pure conscious part of the process, but much of the whole process remains intuitive, and the pure part could not even be separated from the rest in practice, even if we can make a conceptual difference.

Also, 'navigating the world pretty well' is not a good guide to understanding the facts. And as I said in an earlier post, understanding the facts is foundational, is bedrock, to understanding everything we think, even if we already navigate quite well without such understandings. We might navigate better with better understandings. We might not, for example, be currently killing each other in huge numbers so often and indeed destroying our own ecosystem to the point of endangering our very survival. A big ask, I know, and I'm not promising anything, but it's the backdrop, and arguably one rather massive caveat/counterpoint to saying stuff like "as a species, we're currently navigating successfully, or even pretty well", isn't it?

I did not make that claim, so I'm not sure whom you're quoting, but still, I think overall we are doing pretty well. Life is overall better than it was at any time in the past. And our species is not at imminent risk, either.

But sure, plenty of people are doing bad things.

It isn't, not when it comes to the brain stuff that neuro/psych/bio/cognitive science explores, namely how our brain works and our understanding of phenomena such as consciousness, free will, self, perception, etc. All of those are endemically riddled with intuitive misunderstandings. And they involve non-trivial issues, and so should not be readily dismissed as you are doing with them. Intuitive misunderstandings about these things are widespread and run deep into nearly everything we think and do. Please do not be like the person who denies or minimises racism by explaining away every example of it as an isolated incident.

To this, I would say:

Please do not be like the left-winger who vastly exaggerates the incidence of racism (except anti-White racism) by unjustly accusing people of racism when they have no good reason to think there is racism in the first place. Of course, mentioning that or the fact that many left-wingers who do that are solidly anti-White racists no doubt would result in my immediate condemnation as a racist by a gazillion people if they were to read that. Such is life. But they would be mistaken about nonmoral facts to make that assessment. And you seem to be acquainted with the facts involving the failure of intuitions, but seem to minimize the much, much bigger background of success. Sure, intuitions do fail sometimes. And there are systematic errors under specific conditions, but the general background is one of success, not of failure.

And you may say,"sure, but we seem to be able to navigate the world pretty well nonetheless". And I will say, "yes, but the people who believed entities called demons caused lunacy would have said the same thing that you are now saying". So again, navigating the world pretty well (even if we are doing it; see above giant caveats about endless wars and destroying the planet) has demonstrably not been a good guide to understanding the facts, and there is a case for being inherently more philosophically skeptical, even before a particular intuition is dislodged by evidence, than you seem to be, not least because the dislodging has already started, albeit you are trying to set it aside.

I would not say "sure, but we seem to be able to navigate the world pretty well nonetheless", but rather, something like we navigate our world pretty well relying on a gazillion other intuitions that yield true information.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

"An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind".
(Attributed to Mahatma Ghandi)

It wouldn't leave everyone blind, of course.
However, "an eye for an eye" is a terrible idea anyway. The main problem is that it is not just, since it computes effects, rather than mental properties of the perpetrator, like intent and beliefs. My point is: while the (exterior, not mental) behavior of a person allows us to know facts about her mind, and so indirectly, whether she acted wrongfully, etc., what matters when it comes to desert is the mind of the perpetrator. It would be vastly unjust to take out the eye of a person just because she accidentally took out the eye of another. Now, if a vicious criminal gauges out the eye of one of his victims for fun, then I think removing an eye would be one of the many alternative just punishments.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

More or less the way it is currently working?

In a world of interacting machines, if one machine damages another machine, the supervisory machines don't necessarily need to make a moral judgement about it. The evidence that it happened would be enough for the supervisory machines to take corrective action.

Or, more realistically, if the machines have a lot of trouble not making moral judgements (because they have evolved to have them) they can at least temper their morally judgemental urges by accepting certain things about the way the machines (including themselves) actually work.

This has arguably already been gradually happening for centuries. Modern, liberal justice is different from ancient tribal or medieval justice, because we now know more things about how our brains actually work (eg mental illnesses and other conditions for example. Even an understanding of genetics is starting to play a role).

You misunderstood what I was saying. The AntiChris proposed pragmatic responses to wrongdoing. See this post for further details.

 

[ruby sparks]

It is not going to go away, but it is not going to be more than a minuscule proportion of the cases in which our intuitions give us true results, even if you - or even some of the researchers - fail to realize, probably due to the salience of the cases in which some intuitions mislead us, that they are all the time using intuitions that do not fail, even to realize that some of the intuitions are misleading.

Or is it physics? I'm not sure how to compare them, but sure, understanding the brain is very important for a number of purposes.

Neuro/psych/bio/cognitive science is in some ways the exploration of that other, earlier, very famous attempt to get to philosophical bedrock, 'I think therefore I am'.

I do not see in which sense, but okay, maybe.

In pursuit of the facts about that, intuitions do not cut the mustard.

And here is where you go wrong. Intuitions cut the mustard all the time. Scientists who study the brain rely on intuitions all the time. Even if they test some intuition on some specific cases and realize that those intuitions are mislading us, they are using many more and stronger intuitions in the process, as they:

1. Intuitively apprehend there are instruments around them, colleagues and people who take part in the experiment. They trust their senses all the time to do the experiment (and if the experiment is about some situations in which human senses are misleading, then they still rely on their senses nearly all the time in the process of doing the experiments).
2. Intuitively apprehend that those people have minds too, have beliefs, etc., and of course have intuitions.
3. Intuitively apprehend what happened a few seconds before their present, and a few minutes, and hours, and the previous day, etc, which allow them continuity in their experiment.
4. Intuitively make an epistemic probabilistic assessment to reckon that the experiments show that some particular intuitions are misleading (remember that the results are compatible with infinitely many mutually disjoint hypotheses; intuitively, researches pick one).

I accept all that and have said several times that I accept all that. I even made an important distinction at the start of the post you replied to there.

I was and have been specifically talking about the intuitions you have about what your senses of consciousness, self and free will, perception, etc are and how they are working. These senses underpin almost everything you think you know.

Now, when it comes to understanding what those those important, foundational things are and how they work, mere intuitions, uninformed by science, do not cut the mustard. It's not up for debate, Angra, no matter how reluctant you feel about accepting it.

By the way, I'm not seeking to devalue intuitions. They are invaluable in the everyday sense and as you say guide us all the time, and by and large generally seem to work quite well. But for example, what I am saying is that they might still be intrinsically, systemically (not just occasionally) misleading when it comes to understanding your sense of self, consciousness and free will. And quite possibly your sense of morality too.

In other words, your sense of, for example, free will may, in fact does 'work well' in navigating the world, especially in everyday terms, but may nonetheless be an illusion, as science is suggesting.

And how you navigate the world, including your moral judgements, would likely change if your folk-psychological, intuitive sense of free will at the very least started to weaken, which a great deal and growing amount of scientific evidence strongly suggests it should. And defining it inadequately (in colloquial terms) is only dodging the issues that are being increasingly thrown up.

 

[The AntiChris]

I think we should do the minimum necessary (where appropriate) to achieve deterrence, rehabilitation, societal protection and restoration. These are all considered, by most, to be forms of punishment but they're not (in my view) "deserved" - they're pragmatic responses to wrongdoing (they're consequentialist reasons for punishment).

You were talking about pragmatic responses to wrongdoing, not pragmatic responses to law breaking.

I don't know how you got this from what I said. I certainly had law breaking in mind when I wrote that.

But if there is no fact of the matter as to whether a person behaves wrongfully, then who are the people on which the state is to impose deterrence, incapacitation and/or restoration?

Law breakers.

I'm really not sure what you're getting at with this line of questioning.

 

[ruby sparks]

...... we navigate our world pretty well relying on a gazillion other intuitions that yield true information.

And a theist would say the same thing about the everyday.

Except that they have the additional belief in an invisible external superpower.

While your additional belief (as regards free will) may be in an invisible internal superpower.

So you and a theist may have something quite significant in common, a belief in magic.

 

[ruby sparks]

In the particular case of morality, however, I would ask the following question: let us say there is a species-wide moral sense (i.e., the agreement in question). How would it come to pass that there are no moral facts? In other words, what else would be needed?

Nothing, I think.

If there was a species-wide moral sense (covering things within a certain domain) then the content of that sense would be moral facts, for that species, to the extent that they are consistently present.

You will note that that second sentence started with an if.

But I have offered, 'it is wrong to kill or harm another human without justification' as a starter candidate.

 

[ruby sparks]

..... here is my theory about the differences between S1 vs. S2 and S1 vs. S3, that makes the latter more difficult to assess:

In my scenarios (S1 vs. S2), my other goal (apart from the bit about our kinds of apes above) was to argue that just retribution was, in an of itself, a good thing. So, I made scenarios that differed in the amount of just retribution, but which did not differ on the other things that were brought up as competitors in this thread - restoration, isolation, rehabilitation, deterrence. And your verdict is the same as mine.
But S1 vs. S3 is different. In S1 there is more just retribution than there is in S3, no doubt. That is a good thing, so all other (morally relevant) things equal, S1 is better than S3. Yet, not all other morally relevant things are equal. In S3, a wrongdoer reforms, and stops being evil. That is also a good thing all other things equal, and it is a good thing that is not in S1. After further consideration, there appears to be a difficulty with S3: it's not psychologically realistic that a monster like that would reform. That I think is making the matter more difficult to intuitively grasp. But after having contemplated the scenarios for a while longer, it seems to me S1 is still better, because a moral monster gets killed in retribution, rather than getting better. Maybe it would be different with people who are less evil.

Sorry, but that's unconvincing. In the real world, criminals (even murderers) do reform. Your choosing to have in your scenario that he dos not reform was merely your preferred option. Even his being what you described as a serial killer was not necessary for the scenario, since serial killers are only a special case when considering retribution for killing.

I suggest that the ending of my S3 was as valid as the ending of your S1, and you haven't yet shown that S1 is necessarily better, and I am going to say something more about this in my next post.

Although can I just check, is your saying that retribution is morally right (of itself) a form of consequentialism? If so, I'm not sure if that's 'of itself', it being dependent on consequences. I think everyone could agree that if it were the case that retribution resulted in better outcomes then it would be a good and useful thing overall. That would not be too controversial. But it would not be what is usually called retributivism. Wikipedia says "The retributivist will think consequentialism is mistaken".

 

[ruby sparks]

"An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind".
(Attributed to Mahatma Ghandi)

It wouldn't leave everyone blind, of course.
However, "an eye for an eye" is a terrible idea anyway. The main problem is that it is not just, since it computes effects, rather than mental properties of the perpetrator, like intent and beliefs. My point is: while the (exterior, not mental) behavior of a person allows us to know facts about her mind, and so indirectly, whether she acted wrongfully, etc., what matters when it comes to desert is the mind of the perpetrator. It would be vastly unjust to take out the eye of a person just because she accidentally took out the eye of another. Now, if a vicious criminal gauges out the eye of one of his victims for fun, then I think removing an eye would be one of the many alternative just punishments.

Well of course I was not talking about accidents, and nor was the line attributed to Gandhi (although apparently he never said it but that's irrelevant).

And no, it wouldn't necessarily leave everyone blind, unless an eye-poking world war broke out and got completely out of tit-for-tat control. Very unrealistic, one would hope.

But, it would leave two people involved (in a particular case) blind, or more to the point dead, if the initial act to be responded to was a killing, as with both the men in your S1 scenario, which I think you say was just, of itself. It would mean that if Gordon Wilson was able to apprehend the terrorist that killed his daughter, and killed him in (an eye for an eye) retribution, that both his daughter and the terrorist would be dead.

Murder is, thankfully, rare compared to the total of all crimes. Take the wider view and a much more common example, harm in general. Someone harms me in some way. Let's say they slap me in the face. I eschew retribution and forgive them, completely. I do not seek any retribution of any sort.

Now, if you want to say that retribution is, of itself, the morally right response, then I think you would need to show that an alternative, forgiveness, is not a morally right response. And if it's situation-dependent or consequence-dependent, then that surely weakens a retributivist case.