Social contradictions: ua-cam.com/video/mivZ5augY68/v-deo.html The incoherence of morality: ua-cam.com/video/w4tRgsHcXQU/v-deo.html The queerness argument: ua-cam.com/video/MCM-xhiHg1E/v-deo.html Moorean shift: ua-cam.com/video/i7zt-tEYpoU/v-deo.html
From the examples you gave it's seems clear to me that the best logic to model "comon sense morality" would be a fuzzy logic. That is logic that asings a truth value between 0.0 and 1.0. It accounts for people merging different moral criteria into one final choice that might be morally grey. Another counterpoint I would give to the moral trivilist is the folowing: At the end of day you still have to take desitions of what to do everyday (even if that desisition is to be inactive) and some of this actions will be moral. Saing that all actions are moral doesn't liberate yourself from the act of picking one of that moral actions (for example killing yourself to send a message). So, because morality can be though as "what sould do" and you always have to do something you always have an implicit moral stance.
@slumlordelly I am a non native speaker writing on the phone with no spell checker. I could use chat gpt, but these days I sometimes prefer to leave it that way to signal that I'm not a bot... Ok, is laziness XD
Fuzzy logic is cryptonite for philosophy. Once you realize that's how human language tends to work, you also realize that any complex argument made in human language is bound to result in extremely uncertain conclusions. Regarding "you always have to do something", that's incorrect. We usually do pretty much nothing with regards to just about anything that ever happens. We are quite happy to not have a moral stance about any of it, until we need to pick one. In this view, morality is not something we want, it's something we are forced into. By life.
@@bakters Inaction I think also has an implicit moral stance (yes probably the common one given the number of issues that can cross the mind of person), for instance of you know and issue you could help with (you can imagine hunger in X part of the world, but any issue apply) If you are not helping actively with it and you don't have remorse of not doing it I would say the moral stance might be something along the lines of "the good of people near me is more important than the problems of people I am not related with". The fact is that everyday we take hundreds of decisions and probably most of them that regard other people might be though as moral. Regarding the fuzzy logic... I agree that's is not a very interesting topic but I just have to bring it up because seems to fit the specific problems that were brought up in the video.
@@petrusboniatus It makes no sense to ascribe moral value to an action, or inaction, which has unforeseen consequences. I'll give an example. Someone tricked you and replaced the medicine in the vial with poison. You treat someone with the supposed medicine, the person suffers, who's to blame? Apparently, there is a surprisingly large subset of people who can't differentiate the deed from its consequences, so since you did it, it's your fault. However, most people understand very well, that at least in this case, the intent is more important than the outcome. Regarding fuzzy logic, I meant it literally. Philosophy ignores it, since if it took it seriously, nobody should take philosophy seriously. Which is my exact stance.
Regarding the argument that any criticism of trivialism (for simplicity let's say we're talking about trivialism in a general sense) is simply part of the content of trivialism, I feel like it would be more accurate to say that any criticism of trivialism is _an implication_ of trivialism. It seems to me that the actual _content_ of trivialism is the general proposition "all propositions are true", or other words to that effect, rather than an explicit enumeration and endorsement of _every_ proposition. And if I reply to "all propositions are true" with some specific proposition, I'm not simply repeating back part of what was said to me, I'm exploring an implication of what was said, quite possibly an implication the speaker never considered, which seems like a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to change your mind on the basis of.
Hello Kane, long time viewer here. I was wondering if you plan on making a video on the logic of future contingents if you already haven’t. Let me know what you think. Thanks
There is of course nothing new about the idea that the logic of obligation is non-classical. People have been trying to develop deontic logics for many years and there is still no consensus.
I did not know about Tiantai Buddhism as an older example of nondual trivialism, but this kind of thing is interesting to consider when looking at the perspectives of current monks, who might have a bias against this kind of thinking, in that it turns nonduality into a permission structure for doing anything, no matter how horrible. Why choose an empty life with a minimal sense of responsibility, versus the life of Sade's libertines? It is all the same.
Regarding the whole "morality must be action-guiding" thing: I think I've heard some natural-rights theorists motivate their reasoning in a way that relies on the assumption that, as you say, "the world will be kind to us" when it comes to moral facts. The reasoning goes like this (I think it's fallacious, but to them it seems very natural): 1. If (moral principle A) were not true, there would be no non-arbitrary objectively right answer to (moral dilemma X). 2. But morality is supposed to be action-guiding, so that would be a contradiction to the very concept of morality. 3. Therefore (moral principle A) is true. Importantly, that allows the person to get away with _not having any other_ independent reason to believe in moral principle A. They can just say "any other option is contradictory", and that's it.
Entailing trivialism strikes me as the philosophical equivalent of the clichéd fictive conclusion "...and it was all a dream!". It's just... such a frustrating let-down, yuh know?
Isn't a utilitarian calculus already a form of resolving these contradictions? Let's say you have a duty to help your sick daughter, and the only way to afford care is to steal. Let's also accept that stealing is bad. If "stealing is bad" is then taken to mean "For any two choices where one entails stealing and the other does not, the latter is the better one", and "duty" gets an analogous definition, then there indeed is a contradiction: The two options are: 1. steal and help your daughter 2. neglect your daughter but stay lawful. By the definition of "stealing is bad", 2. is better than 1., and by the definition of "you have a duty to help your daughter", 1. is better than 2. But under a utilitarian calculus, "stealing is bad" would not entail the above definition. Instead, you would assign to any result a numerical value, for example "stealing" gets a value of -3, and "helping your daughter" gets a value of +6. Then you can compare the two options rather easily: 1. gets the value 6-3 = 3, and 2. gets the value 0 (because you neither stole nor helped your daughter). With this, 1. has the highest value amongst all the options, and you have judged that helping your daughter is better than obeying the law, and all without any logical contradictions - even though there were two moral imperatives that were in conflict with each other. Of course, I don't believe that everyone ought to assign numbers to things to make consistent moral judgements, as the numbers are rather arbitrary, but as a model of how we think of moral questions, this seems a lot better than the discrete models that you described running into actual contradictions in this video.
Perhaps in doing that calculation you must bring that deontological statement into the domain of consequentialism; the deontological proponent may take it that such a statement only exists as a universal law, no numerical value can be attached to it.
The problem then arises with the assigning of numbers. Why would helping your daughter get a duty value of +6, stealing a -3, etc.? Your values would have to be based on something external to the calculus, a theory of duty that you are implicitly drawing on.
@@ayylmao2710 I was considering things from the perspective of the moral constructivism laid out in 18:56: It assumes that there exists a given set of fundamental values, and you can then pragmatically derive a course of best action from these values. If those fundamental values are a given, it makes complete sense to me that you would equally have a sense of how strongly you weigh these fundamental values. That's what the numbers represent. I agree that "you shouldn't steal" isn't a fundamental value - at least not in my opinion - but from the deontological perspective, some actions by themselves do have a fundamental value, and what I'm saying is that you can escape these contradictions if you treat that value as a number.
Morality is easy. If something seems wrong then I don't do it. But if I have time to think it over, my feeling about it might change. Conclusion: Don't decide anything sooner than necessary.
Hello! Charitably, you’re just isolating the tool of intuition (though in my opinion it’s more of a constructive byproduct). And you’re indirectly affirming any impulsive wrongdoing within your own framework, look at your third sentence. And your ‘conclusion’ is more of an inference from two arbitrary premises, with arrogance in the first sentence that’s honestly proportional to the fuzzy incoherence here. Some more notes: - Reflection (my assumption here, unless you mean something else by think it over) doesn’t always lead to change, but what if YOU think it’s needed? If I reflect on my feeling and feel no shame, what is the extent of what I’m allowed to do before mechanism of x does y becomes ‘seemingly wrong’? - You haven’t proved morality is easy (?) you just proved your worldview is (relatively, even then hardly so) - Glass-half full way to ‘justify’ a lack of moral conviction - ‘Think it over’ (?)
Deontological theories ascriptive of the state might adopt a pro-natalist stance to boost population, where a non governmental organisation might advocate for rules as reflecting a commitment to international standards of reproductive rights and family planning. Alternatively, they might champion policies that prioritise environmental sustainability and resource management, even if diverge from the state's immediate economic goals that require an increase in population. NGO's are the kind of entities to find instances of moral contradictions given their advocacy and cultural ambassadors both align and not align them to the state.
Morality is a class, not an instance. Who is better: Lionel Messi or Tom Brady? It doesn't make sense unless you specify which sport. You can answer based on which sport you like, that is what people do for questions in morality. You can't have objective answers until you specify a system/metric.
It must be clear, that Moral dialetheism implies Moral trivialism, for there can be no possible destinction to Some contradictions being true while Others Not, scince the law of non contradiction was already given away. Just Like with an Imagined Chain of dependences, that, If only one element is necessary, the entire Chain must be necessary, as it would be indeed, for a necessity does Neither ground or is grounded by any contingency by Definition. More on that If you Like can be found in the Work of Amy Karofsky. Secondly, it must be clear that If anything, dialetheism is wrong, for it is contradictory and namely openly so. To say of a contradiction, a Statement both true and False, that it is true, is to dubble the contradiction, by saying that that which is false is true and False again. No Argument can be made by and for this, because it undermines itself outright, as it implies necessarily that it is wrong while both saying to be right. One can See the triviality in and the futility, so one must conclude that anyone taking this to be true must Not understand anything right, or is completely disfunctional and comperable to a Rock in its effectiveness and prowess to think and argue, without meaning it as an Insult. Rather i seek to find the proper tone to this absurdity of all absurdities. A true contradiction is Open to noone and nothing.
Okay, as a "lakatosian dialetiist" I would say that contradiction is an act, not a thing. Morality isn't something that is "out there in the world" as a mind independent thing. Morality is derived from simple axioms, such as "people each have a unique set of desires". During the process of serving morality, contradictions are going to be discovered and then overcome. Hence, Morality both has contradictions and does not have contradictions. The truth and untruth of all things as it were. (I really really really loved your 'O' diagram in this video). Let's look at the example of agreeing to clean Verity's house while also agreeing to stay away from Sydney. It would be easy to derive the morality of fulfilling agreements, but when I arrive at Verity's house, Sydney is sitting on the couch!! This creates a moral contradiction, but from this we can now derive further rules about morality. One way could be that when I must do something, but cannot do that thing, cannot wins. Another way would be to do some cost benefit analysis to see which agreement would be worse to break, and then break the other. Picking just one solution would lead to further contradiction, so we would then derive the circumstances in which to apply which rule. And so on. Thus, by using the Lakatos method of proofs and refutations, we can progress the research programme of ethics.
I'm genuinely puzzled how come you philosopher guys came up with the "queerness" concept regarding specifically moral values. If objective moral values are weird, because they have to exist in some weird way, then any other laws of nature are just as weird, since they also need ot exist in some equally weird way. The "form of existence" argument makes no sense to me. BTW - I think that moral values are objective but not absolute. Meaning, that if the stories the pharaohs told about themselves were true, then marriage between close siblings should be permissible for them.
i kind of agree with you on the queerness argument. i think a sort of “version” (if it counts as that) which makes more sense is that rather than moral values being a unique kind of thing, that they have to be observed or verified in a unique kind of way which we wouldn’t usually accept. this might just be moving too far into a different epistemic objection though. also, on your other point based on your example, i think it would be more accurate to say to believe that “moral values are real but not objective”. the example you gave sounds like cultural relativism, which is subjective (as the conclusion depends on the subject who is being judged) but realist. non-absolutism would look more like “abortion is objectively wrong, but some exceptions in special circumstances can be permissible”. so the moral value is constant, but can be weighed against competing values to permit some actions which violate that value.
@@inoculatedcity No, I literally meant "objective, but not absolute". Coming back to my example, marriage between close siblings is wrong, because it leads to genetic problems of inbreeding. However, if pharaohs (as they said) were truly a different king of beings, who did not follow the same rules of nature, then it'd likely be fine for them to ignore this prohibition, since it would not apply to them. Another example would be the prohibition of cannibalism. I think we understood why it's a really bad thing only quite recently, and it's due to prions. However, if we imagined an alternate Universe where prions do not exist, but you really can gain the power of the deceased by consuming their flesh, then it'd be morally acceptable to do so, at least in some circumstances. Both of those examples refer objective reality, but they are not absolutes, since if the underlying reality would change, the moral rules would likely change too.
@ I see, thanks for clarifying. although it’s interesting that in both these examples, the wrongness is based on some kind of biological harm. it makes more sense why this would be a moral issue in the case of incest since you are inflicting the harm on the child, but in the case of cannibalism the harm is to yourself. that seems kind of strange, like saying eating raw chicken is morally wrong. there are alternative socially-based arguments for the moral wrongness of incest and cannibalism as well
@@inoculatedcity You make it sound like having a moral stance on the kind of food that is permissible to consume is something rare. It really is not. Hypothetically, if eating raw chicken was common enough and dangerous enough to warrant having a social norm developed around it, yes, it's quite likely we would have had such a norm.
Morality seems an obfuscatory language game. And objective morality is incoherent. So I just assent to moral nihilism: moral facts dont exist. Do what you want.
It must be clear, that Moral dialetheism implies Moral trivialism, for there can be no possible destinction to Some contradictions being true while Others Not, scince the law of non contradiction was already given away. Just Like with an Imagined Chain of dependences, that, If only one element is necessary, the entire Chain must be necessary, as it would be indeed, for a necessity does Neither ground or is grounded by any contingency by Definition. More on that If you Like can be found in the Work of Amy Karofsky. Secondly, it must be clear that If anything, dialetheism is wrong, for it is contradictory and namely openly so. To say of a contradiction, a Statement both true and False, that it is true, is to dubble the contradiction, by saying that that which is false is true and False again. No Argument can be made by and for this, because it undermines itself outright, as it implies necessarily that it is wrong while both saying to be right. One can See the triviality in and the futility, so one must conclude that anyone taking this to be true must Not understand anything right, or is completely disfunctional and comperable to a Rock in its effectiveness and prowess to think and argue, without meaning it as an Insult. Rather i seek to find the proper tone to this absurdity of all absurdities. There can be No Argument for the existence of contradictions! Not meaning, that contradictions cannot accure, as in thought or speech. The simply dont apply as the Impossible, of which enough is thought and tried.
Social contradictions: ua-cam.com/video/mivZ5augY68/v-deo.html
The incoherence of morality: ua-cam.com/video/w4tRgsHcXQU/v-deo.html
The queerness argument: ua-cam.com/video/MCM-xhiHg1E/v-deo.html
Moorean shift: ua-cam.com/video/i7zt-tEYpoU/v-deo.html
Thanks
Time to start doing applied ethics Kane B
From the examples you gave it's seems clear to me that the best logic to model "comon sense morality" would be a fuzzy logic. That is logic that asings a truth value between 0.0 and 1.0. It accounts for people merging different moral criteria into one final choice that might be morally grey.
Another counterpoint I would give to the moral trivilist is the folowing:
At the end of day you still have to take desitions of what to do everyday (even if that desisition is to be inactive) and some of this actions will be moral. Saing that all actions are moral doesn't liberate yourself from the act of picking one of that moral actions (for example killing yourself to send a message). So, because morality can be though as "what sould do" and you always have to do something you always have an implicit moral stance.
You make an interesting point.but i’m honestly more impressed that you made a good point with those egregious spelling error’s.well done sir
@slumlordelly I am a non native speaker writing on the phone with no spell checker. I could use chat gpt, but these days I sometimes prefer to leave it that way to signal that I'm not a bot...
Ok, is laziness XD
Fuzzy logic is cryptonite for philosophy. Once you realize that's how human language tends to work, you also realize that any complex argument made in human language is bound to result in extremely uncertain conclusions.
Regarding "you always have to do something", that's incorrect. We usually do pretty much nothing with regards to just about anything that ever happens. We are quite happy to not have a moral stance about any of it, until we need to pick one. In this view, morality is not something we want, it's something we are forced into. By life.
@@bakters Inaction I think also has an implicit moral stance (yes probably the common one given the number of issues that can cross the mind of person), for instance of you know and issue you could help with (you can imagine hunger in X part of the world, but any issue apply) If you are not helping actively with it and you don't have remorse of not doing it I would say the moral stance might be something along the lines of "the good of people near me is more important than the problems of people I am not related with". The fact is that everyday we take hundreds of decisions and probably most of them that regard other people might be though as moral.
Regarding the fuzzy logic... I agree that's is not a very interesting topic but I just have to bring it up because seems to fit the specific problems that were brought up in the video.
@@petrusboniatus It makes no sense to ascribe moral value to an action, or inaction, which has unforeseen consequences.
I'll give an example. Someone tricked you and replaced the medicine in the vial with poison. You treat someone with the supposed medicine, the person suffers, who's to blame?
Apparently, there is a surprisingly large subset of people who can't differentiate the deed from its consequences, so since you did it, it's your fault. However, most people understand very well, that at least in this case, the intent is more important than the outcome.
Regarding fuzzy logic, I meant it literally. Philosophy ignores it, since if it took it seriously, nobody should take philosophy seriously. Which is my exact stance.
Regarding the argument that any criticism of trivialism (for simplicity let's say we're talking about trivialism in a general sense) is simply part of the content of trivialism, I feel like it would be more accurate to say that any criticism of trivialism is _an implication_ of trivialism.
It seems to me that the actual _content_ of trivialism is the general proposition "all propositions are true", or other words to that effect, rather than an explicit enumeration and endorsement of _every_ proposition. And if I reply to "all propositions are true" with some specific proposition, I'm not simply repeating back part of what was said to me, I'm exploring an implication of what was said, quite possibly an implication the speaker never considered, which seems like a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to change your mind on the basis of.
Hello Kane, long time viewer here. I was wondering if you plan on making a video on the logic of future contingents if you already haven’t. Let me know what you think.
Thanks
There is of course nothing new about the idea that the logic of obligation is non-classical. People have been trying to develop deontic logics for many years and there is still no consensus.
I did not know about Tiantai Buddhism as an older example of nondual trivialism, but this kind of thing is interesting to consider when looking at the perspectives of current monks, who might have a bias against this kind of thinking, in that it turns nonduality into a permission structure for doing anything, no matter how horrible. Why choose an empty life with a minimal sense of responsibility, versus the life of Sade's libertines? It is all the same.
You really outdid yourself!
Regarding the whole "morality must be action-guiding" thing:
I think I've heard some natural-rights theorists motivate their reasoning in a way that relies on the assumption that, as you say, "the world will be kind to us" when it comes to moral facts.
The reasoning goes like this (I think it's fallacious, but to them it seems very natural):
1. If (moral principle A) were not true, there would be no non-arbitrary objectively right answer to (moral dilemma X).
2. But morality is supposed to be action-guiding, so that would be a contradiction to the very concept of morality.
3. Therefore (moral principle A) is true.
Importantly, that allows the person to get away with _not having any other_ independent reason to believe in moral principle A. They can just say "any other option is contradictory", and that's it.
I genuinely do not understand what you wrote. Can you give me examples?
Entailing trivialism strikes me as the philosophical equivalent of the clichéd fictive conclusion "...and it was all a dream!". It's just... such a frustrating let-down, yuh know?
was the discord server deleted? Why?
0:52 as a witch i beg to differ
Isn't a utilitarian calculus already a form of resolving these contradictions?
Let's say you have a duty to help your sick daughter, and the only way to afford care is to steal. Let's also accept that stealing is bad.
If "stealing is bad" is then taken to mean "For any two choices where one entails stealing and the other does not, the latter is the better one", and "duty" gets an analogous definition, then there indeed is a contradiction:
The two options are:
1. steal and help your daughter
2. neglect your daughter but stay lawful.
By the definition of "stealing is bad", 2. is better than 1., and by the definition of "you have a duty to help your daughter", 1. is better than 2.
But under a utilitarian calculus, "stealing is bad" would not entail the above definition. Instead, you would assign to any result a numerical value, for example "stealing" gets a value of -3, and "helping your daughter" gets a value of +6.
Then you can compare the two options rather easily: 1. gets the value 6-3 = 3, and 2. gets the value 0 (because you neither stole nor helped your daughter). With this, 1. has the highest value amongst all the options, and you have judged that helping your daughter is better than obeying the law, and all without any logical contradictions - even though there were two moral imperatives that were in conflict with each other.
Of course, I don't believe that everyone ought to assign numbers to things to make consistent moral judgements, as the numbers are rather arbitrary, but as a model of how we think of moral questions, this seems a lot better than the discrete models that you described running into actual contradictions in this video.
Perhaps in doing that calculation you must bring that deontological statement into the domain of consequentialism; the deontological proponent may take it that such a statement only exists as a universal law, no numerical value can be attached to it.
The problem then arises with the assigning of numbers. Why would helping your daughter get a duty value of +6, stealing a -3, etc.? Your values would have to be based on something external to the calculus, a theory of duty that you are implicitly drawing on.
@@ayylmao2710 I was considering things from the perspective of the moral constructivism laid out in 18:56:
It assumes that there exists a given set of fundamental values, and you can then pragmatically derive a course of best action from these values.
If those fundamental values are a given, it makes complete sense to me that you would equally have a sense of how strongly you weigh these fundamental values. That's what the numbers represent.
I agree that "you shouldn't steal" isn't a fundamental value - at least not in my opinion - but from the deontological perspective, some actions by themselves do have a fundamental value, and what I'm saying is that you can escape these contradictions if you treat that value as a number.
Morality is easy. If something seems wrong then I don't do it. But if I have time to think it over, my feeling about it might change. Conclusion: Don't decide anything sooner than necessary.
Hello! Charitably, you’re just isolating the tool of intuition (though in my opinion it’s more of a constructive byproduct). And you’re indirectly affirming any impulsive wrongdoing within your own framework, look at your third sentence.
And your ‘conclusion’ is more of an inference from two arbitrary premises, with arrogance in the first sentence that’s honestly proportional to the fuzzy incoherence here.
Some more notes:
- Reflection (my assumption here, unless you mean something else by think it over) doesn’t always lead to change, but what if YOU think it’s needed? If I reflect on my feeling and feel no shame, what is the extent of what I’m allowed to do before mechanism of x does y becomes ‘seemingly wrong’?
- You haven’t proved morality is easy (?) you just proved your worldview is (relatively, even then hardly so)
- Glass-half full way to ‘justify’ a lack of moral conviction
- ‘Think it over’ (?)
Nice.
Deontological theories ascriptive of the state might adopt a pro-natalist stance to boost population, where a non governmental organisation might advocate for rules as reflecting a commitment to international standards of reproductive rights and family planning. Alternatively, they might champion policies that prioritise environmental sustainability and resource management, even if diverge from the state's immediate economic goals that require an increase in population. NGO's are the kind of entities to find instances of moral contradictions given their advocacy and cultural ambassadors both align and not align them to the state.
how would moral conservationism fit into this? it seems like that could be another form of moral dialethieism, distinct from these two
Morality is a class, not an instance.
Who is better: Lionel Messi or Tom Brady? It doesn't make sense unless you specify which sport. You can answer based on which sport you like, that is what people do for questions in morality. You can't have objective answers until you specify a system/metric.
It must be clear, that Moral dialetheism implies Moral trivialism, for there can be no possible destinction to Some contradictions being true while Others Not, scince the law of non contradiction was already given away. Just Like with an Imagined Chain of dependences, that, If only one element is necessary, the entire Chain must be necessary, as it would be indeed, for a necessity does Neither ground or is grounded by any contingency by Definition.
More on that If you Like can be found in the Work of Amy Karofsky.
Secondly, it must be clear that If anything, dialetheism is wrong, for it is contradictory and namely openly so. To say of a contradiction, a Statement both true and False, that it is true, is to dubble the contradiction, by saying that that which is false is true and False again. No Argument can be made by and for this, because it undermines itself outright, as it implies necessarily that it is wrong while both saying to be right.
One can See the triviality in and the futility, so one must conclude that anyone taking this to be true must Not understand anything right, or is completely disfunctional and comperable to a Rock in its effectiveness and prowess to think and argue, without meaning it as an Insult. Rather i seek to find the proper tone to this absurdity of all absurdities.
A true contradiction is Open to noone and nothing.
But thanks again for the Video, great Work.
It's 8:08 AM in your place now and you are already awake?
Philosophers wake up early.
Don't believe the other guy. Philosophers don't sleep.
No, philosophers set an upload time.
who told you 8 o'clock was an early time to get up? that's basically standard.
@@chluff He once said in one of his AMA videos that his sleep time is from 6/7 AM to 2/3 PM if I remember correctly.
Okay, as a "lakatosian dialetiist" I would say that contradiction is an act, not a thing. Morality isn't something that is "out there in the world" as a mind independent thing. Morality is derived from simple axioms, such as "people each have a unique set of desires". During the process of serving morality, contradictions are going to be discovered and then overcome. Hence, Morality both has contradictions and does not have contradictions. The truth and untruth of all things as it were. (I really really really loved your 'O' diagram in this video).
Let's look at the example of agreeing to clean Verity's house while also agreeing to stay away from Sydney. It would be easy to derive the morality of fulfilling agreements, but when I arrive at Verity's house, Sydney is sitting on the couch!! This creates a moral contradiction, but from this we can now derive further rules about morality. One way could be that when I must do something, but cannot do that thing, cannot wins. Another way would be to do some cost benefit analysis to see which agreement would be worse to break, and then break the other. Picking just one solution would lead to further contradiction, so we would then derive the circumstances in which to apply which rule. And so on.
Thus, by using the Lakatos method of proofs and refutations, we can progress the research programme of ethics.
I'm genuinely puzzled how come you philosopher guys came up with the "queerness" concept regarding specifically moral values. If objective moral values are weird, because they have to exist in some weird way, then any other laws of nature are just as weird, since they also need ot exist in some equally weird way.
The "form of existence" argument makes no sense to me.
BTW - I think that moral values are objective but not absolute. Meaning, that if the stories the pharaohs told about themselves were true, then marriage between close siblings should be permissible for them.
i kind of agree with you on the queerness argument. i think a sort of “version” (if it counts as that) which makes more sense is that rather than moral values being a unique kind of thing, that they have to be observed or verified in a unique kind of way which we wouldn’t usually accept. this might just be moving too far into a different epistemic objection though.
also, on your other point based on your example, i think it would be more accurate to say to believe that “moral values are real but not objective”. the example you gave sounds like cultural relativism, which is subjective (as the conclusion depends on the subject who is being judged) but realist. non-absolutism would look more like “abortion is objectively wrong, but some exceptions in special circumstances can be permissible”. so the moral value is constant, but can be weighed against competing values to permit some actions which violate that value.
@@inoculatedcity No, I literally meant "objective, but not absolute".
Coming back to my example, marriage between close siblings is wrong, because it leads to genetic problems of inbreeding. However, if pharaohs (as they said) were truly a different king of beings, who did not follow the same rules of nature, then it'd likely be fine for them to ignore this prohibition, since it would not apply to them.
Another example would be the prohibition of cannibalism. I think we understood why it's a really bad thing only quite recently, and it's due to prions. However, if we imagined an alternate Universe where prions do not exist, but you really can gain the power of the deceased by consuming their flesh, then it'd be morally acceptable to do so, at least in some circumstances.
Both of those examples refer objective reality, but they are not absolutes, since if the underlying reality would change, the moral rules would likely change too.
@ I see, thanks for clarifying. although it’s interesting that in both these examples, the wrongness is based on some kind of biological harm. it makes more sense why this would be a moral issue in the case of incest since you are inflicting the harm on the child, but in the case of cannibalism the harm is to yourself. that seems kind of strange, like saying eating raw chicken is morally wrong. there are alternative socially-based arguments for the moral wrongness of incest and cannibalism as well
@@inoculatedcity You make it sound like having a moral stance on the kind of food that is permissible to consume is something rare.
It really is not.
Hypothetically, if eating raw chicken was common enough and dangerous enough to warrant having a social norm developed around it, yes, it's quite likely we would have had such a norm.
Morality seems an obfuscatory language game. And objective morality is incoherent. So I just assent to moral nihilism: moral facts dont exist. Do what you want.
morals judgements are value statements, they are not true or false.
It must be clear, that Moral dialetheism implies Moral trivialism, for there can be no possible destinction to Some contradictions being true while Others Not, scince the law of non contradiction was already given away. Just Like with an Imagined Chain of dependences, that, If only one element is necessary, the entire Chain must be necessary, as it would be indeed, for a necessity does Neither ground or is grounded by any contingency by Definition.
More on that If you Like can be found in the Work of Amy Karofsky.
Secondly, it must be clear that If anything, dialetheism is wrong, for it is contradictory and namely openly so. To say of a contradiction, a Statement both true and False, that it is true, is to dubble the contradiction, by saying that that which is false is true and False again. No Argument can be made by and for this, because it undermines itself outright, as it implies necessarily that it is wrong while both saying to be right.
One can See the triviality in and the futility, so one must conclude that anyone taking this to be true must Not understand anything right, or is completely disfunctional and comperable to a Rock in its effectiveness and prowess to think and argue, without meaning it as an Insult. Rather i seek to find the proper tone to this absurdity of all absurdities.
There can be No Argument for the existence of contradictions! Not meaning, that contradictions cannot accure, as in thought or speech. The simply dont apply as the Impossible, of which enough is thought and tried.
But thanks again for the Video. Great Work