Philosophical Vegan Forum

Again, I think that we're basically on the same page: Isaac and Korsgaard (and AtheneWins) make what are in some decent sense extraordinary claims, which doesn't have to do with how uncommon they are (thanks for making clear how you're seeing the distinction between extremity and commonality).

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Wed Nov 29, 2017 8:47 pm
I don't think they have to be neutral, but if they claim to be and the user of the argument wants to avoid those discussions then they certainly need to be.
I don't think arguments from naturalistic realism are a problem since it's not that hard to argue for that position, and I would say that the strongest arguments are based on that; like arguments from sentience being the trait of moral value, and moral consideration being based on interests.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Wed Nov 29, 2017 7:44 pmand the problem with Isaac (and Korsgaard, and AtheneWins) - unlike those who simply offer good meta-ethically neutral practical ethical arguments like this - is that he (and she, and he) essentially tries to show that substantive ethical claims follow simply from very minimal things like valuing oneself or deliberating.

If you're willing to commit to deliberation leading to naturalistic moral realism, that pretty clearly leads to consequentialism and some kind of preference based framework which necessitates valuing the preferences of sentient beings (as the only ones that have them in any meaningful sense).

I think (and I think it's widely recognized that) it's a really good idea to be as neutral as possible about other philosophical issues in arguing for a specific conclusion so that it can appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

Just for example: I think that I really don't know what you mean by 'naturalistic moral realism', but if you mean the Cornell School realism of Boyd and Railton, then I reject it, and I certainly don't think that it's "not hard" to argue in favour of that position which I believe is false. I don't think that ethical claims get their referents in the way that scientifically identified natural kind terms do in any interesting sense, and that it is completely unhelpful to assume that consequentialism is true and then say that the relationship between ethical terms and bringing about the best consequences is the same as that between 'water' and H20. I think that all of the main metaethical options, which are neutral as to the content of normative ethics, are much more plausible: certainly constructivism & expressivist quasi-realism, but even non-naturalism. I myself think that a form of constructivism is the best option: that ethical facts are facts about what we'd find most plausible at the end of ideal philosophical reflection (which we'll never quite actually reach, but can approximate with our actual world philosophical reflection). I am sympathetic to consequentialism but not quite a consequentialist: I certainly believe that there are underrivative reasons of beneficence to promote the well-being of all of those capable of well-being in the literally, morally important sense (which are at least as strong as defended by Singer's weak principle from Famine Affluence and Morality of being required to prevent harm / benefit others at relatively trivial cost to oneself). I used to think but no longer do that reasons of non-maleficence not to inflict harm are stronger than reasons to prevent harm (and yes, I was perfectly willing to say that it was wrong to diver the trolley, but that isn't the view I hold now). The reason I'm not a consequentialist now is that I still think that there are underrivative special obligations that can require you to give up your own greater good for others' somewhat lesser good - e.g. if one has made a promise, they are your child, or you have wronged someone and now have reasons to make amends. So essentially on my view morality is even more demanding than what consequentilaists think: you must level down to the point of marginal well-being to help strangers, but then you might have to give more, because you might have kids, have made promises, or have wronged others. I won't even get into my views about the good, but suffice it to say that I'm not a sum-ranker and I'm not a preference fulfillment theorist about well-being.

That said, you and I probably hold most of the same views about how to treat non-human animals and help the global poor and such. So it's very important that people like you and I can be swayed by and find overlapping consensus on practical ethical arguments, like those made by Singer in Famine Aflluence and Morality and All Animals are Equal - despite our vast differences on metaethics and normative ethics.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 am Again, I think that we're basically on the same page: Isaac and Korsgaard (and AtheneWins) make what are in some decent sense extraordinary claims, which doesn't have to do with how uncommon they are (thanks for making clear how you're seeing the distinction between extremity and commonality).

While similar in many ways, I hope you'd agree that Isaac's claims are also more extraordinary than those of Korsgaard, given his rejection of any implications more broadly to ethics; it's a very bizarre situation.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amI think (and I think it's widely recognized that) it's a really good idea to be as neutral as possible about other philosophical issues in arguing for a specific conclusion so that it can appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

Perhaps if nothing is lost in being neutral.
But a neutral argument is almost always going to be significantly weaker, so while it may superficially have broader appeal it will be less safe against attack and tendency to permit recidivism based on whatever wiggle room a shifting meta-ethical or normative theory provides.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amI certainly don't think that it's "not hard" to argue in favour of that position which I believe is false.

If we examine the utility to knowledge in telling us things we didn't already know as does science (as opposed to the religious sense which just builds a scaffold to plausibly support preexisting bias), we have to reject constructivist accounts unless they are built upon an unbiased empirical framework -- in which case, we might as well call it naturalistic realism because at that point they're the same thing.

Just saying something akin to "we believe this so that's how it is" is more religion than science. Saying something like "Perfectly rational beings, deliberating on the subject with access to all information, would come up with this solution, so that's how it is" is a bit different, but if we ask what methodology they would be using we can find the path too: it's going to be something scientific that controls for rather than distills bias, and bases any discoveries on other natural facts (as long as we don't presume that any kind of supernatural metaphysics is actually real).
Just because we don't have perfect methodology or all of the facts yet doesn't mean we can't identify the correct meta-ethical and general normative positions.

It's certainly not a matter of infinite regress. (These beings would appeal to other hypothetical beings, which would appeal to others, etc.). Constructivism just deflects, and does not answer the relevant question.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amI don't think that ethical claims get their referents in the way that scientifically identified natural kind terms do in any interesting sense,

Why? And what value could they possibly have if they do not?
Are we back to subjectivism?

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amand that it is completely unhelpful to assume that consequentialism is true and then say that the relationship between ethical terms and bringing about the best consequences is the same as that between 'water' and H20.

It's not an assertion, it's a deduction. It's like the discovery that, ah, after all water is H2O.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amI think that all of the main metaethical options, which are neutral as to the content of normative ethics, are much more plausible: certainly constructivism & expressivist quasi-realism, but even non-naturalism.

Constructivism is the only thing close to coherent of the three, but it degrades into uselessness or infinite regress when probed unless it finds footing along the way in natualistic realism (it only saves itself by being vague), in which case it's not its own thing (like so many attempts at interpretations of quantum physics that basically amount to either hidden variable or MWI).

Expressivist quasi-realism is not useful; no pluralistic or subjectivistic account is coherent or capable of making genuine normative statements.
Beyond that it's insulting to any real discussion of morality. It's all very disingenuous.
Of course somebody can dismiss morality as non-real and just a matter of feelings; you could do the same of reality itself and all of science, but it's not a framework we can function and say anything useful within. Like the laws of thought make any conversation possible, at least some measure of realism is a necessary assumption to talk about morality in any useful way (it may be that it can't be spoken about in a useful way as error theorists claim, but if so that's another matter).
Realism, or at least the first assumption, is not a difficult one to make as long as we're respectful enough to take people at their words: we are expressing propositions, and anybody who says I'm just talking about my feelings and that I don't even mean to express a proposition is comparable to somebody coming into a conversation on science and claiming that we're not even trying to measure reality, we're just talking about what we'd like to be true. That's worse than a factual subjectivist.
I mean, at least error theory I can have some respect for because it's not outright insulting by telling other people what they believe or what they're trying to say (they're just saying those people are mistaken in factual claims).

Non-naturalism? What? How? Maybe for theists. I'm open to discussing theistic metaphysics as a method of approach, but it needs to be clearly separated from secular approaches.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amI myself think that a form of constructivism is the best option: that ethical facts are facts about what we'd find most plausible at the end of ideal philosophical reflection (which we'll never quite actually reach, but can approximate with our actual world philosophical reflection).

Of those three, I should hope so.

I would be personally insulted if you told me I was not attempting to express propositions when I make moral claims. I wouldn't be insulted, but I would think you a little odd if you said something about god being the root of morality.

But as I explained, it's something that breaks down under rigorous examination and turns into naturalistic realism if properly defended. Most frameworks tend to collapse into each other when deconstructed.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amThe reason I'm not a consequentialist now is that I still think that there are underrivative special obligations that can require you to give up your own greater good for others' somewhat lesser good

Are you willing to consider the possibility that you're wrong, and these are personal biases?
If we are willing to casually disregard the knowledge we gain from the most reasonable framework for moral action because we don't like it, we are not practicing any kind of science or philosophy: we're practicing religion.

To many people, religion certainly feels right, but feelings do not make facts. That it feels true that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, and is one of three parts of a single indivisible god... none of that has any bearing on reality.

Like science, if morality has any compelling value, it is because it has an objective truth to it. Being so easily influenced by human bias doesn't seem to speak well to that.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amSo essentially on my view morality is even more demanding than what consequentilaists think: you must level down to the point of marginal well-being to help strangers, but then you might have to give more, because you might have kids, have made promises, or have wronged others. I won't even get into my views about the good, but suffice it to say that I'm not a sum-ranker and I'm not a preference fulfillment theorist about well-being.

You know there is such a thing as altruistic consequentialism?
Like, it's not OK to cause 10 units of suffering to others for 11 units of pleasure for yourself.
And game theory and human psychology certainly have something to say about what should be expected from people; morality would be less moral if it demanded so much as to break people and cause them to give up on it entirely. There are optimal heuristics in there we could refer to as rule consequentialist systems. The current optimal heuristic can evolve, while still being based on a naturalistic realist foundation. That could be called constructivism in a broad sense, but one which at least recognizes unambiguously what "good" is when we ask which moral heuristics do the most good, and that's the only thing that can make it coherent.

I think it would be more productive to talk about the details of this more at a later time, but just briefly:

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 2:57 am

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amI think (and I think it's widely recognized that) it's a really good idea to be as neutral as possible about other philosophical issues in arguing for a specific conclusion so that it can appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

Perhaps if nothing is lost in being neutral.
But a neutral argument is almost always going to be significantly weaker, so while it may superficially have broader appeal it will be less safe against attack and tendency to permit recidivism based on whatever wiggle room a shifting meta-ethical or normative theory provides.

I'm sorry but I really don't see what you're talking about here. The force of Singer's arguments in Famine Affluence and Morality and All Animals are Equal do not depend in the very least whether one is a consequentialist or a non-consequentialist in normative ethics nor whether one is a constructivist, non-naturalist, or expressivist quasi-realist in metaethics. If you talk to real-world consequentialists and non-consequentialists, like Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, they would readily admit that the force of these arguments wouldn't be altered at all if they converted to the normative ethical views of the other. If you talk to real-world constructivists like Sharon Street, real world non-naturalists (like David Enoch, Jeff McMahan, and Peter Singer - all altheists as far as I know; no, contemporary non-naturalism has nothing to do with theism - and note, and note this carefully: Peter Singer, like the Sidgwick to Ewing school before him, is a non-naturalist; see e.g. his recent book with de Lazari-Radek on The Point of View of the Universe), and real world expressivist quasi-realists like Allan Gibbard, they would readily admit that the force of these arguments wouldn't be altered at all if they converted to the meta-ethical views of the others.

As to what you mean by naturalistic moral realism: can you just explain what you take that view to hold? I'm still not sure what you mean by that phrase.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amThe reason I'm not a consequentialist now is that I still think that there are underrivative special obligations that can require you to give up your own greater good for others' somewhat lesser good

Are you willing to consider the possibility that you're wrong, and these are personal biases?
If we are willing to casually disregard the knowledge we gain from the most reasonable framework for moral action because we don't like it, we are not practicing any kind of science or philosophy: we're practicing religion.

Of course I'm willing to consider the possibility that I'm wrong. Unfortunately I do not think that my actual evidence that the ingredients of consequentilaism are true (e.g. a principle of beneficence according to which we have strong moral reasons to promote the well-being of others) differs in kind from my evidence for the existence of these special obligations: viz. that the principles remain most plausible after critical clarification of what they are really saying and what they entail in various contexts, in comparison with rival sets of principles. But I could well be wrong, and it could be, as Sidgwick argued, that only the contents of consequentialism remain most plausible after maximal critical normative-ethical reflection. For instance if there isn't a plausible way to understand affiliative special obligations (e.g. how various forms of intimacy give rise to them and interact with other factors like one's responsibility for various situations, or if there isn't a plausible explanation of duties to keep promises in terms of a more general account of how the underivative ethical relevance of responsibility and autonomy work, etc. those are all ways someone like Sidgwick could convince me that I'm wrong). It's just that, from what I've been able to determine so far, underivative special obligations still seem plausible - as plausible as the underivative duties of beneficence that exhaust the contents of morality on consequentialism).

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:18 amSo essentially on my view morality is even more demanding than what consequentilaists think: you must level down to the point of marginal well-being to help strangers, but then you might have to give more, because you might have kids, have made promises, or have wronged others. I won't even get into my views about the good, but suffice it to say that I'm not a sum-ranker and I'm not a preference fulfillment theorist about well-being.

You know there is such a thing as altruistic consequentialism?
Like, it's not OK to cause 10 units of suffering to others for 11 units of pleasure for yourself.

I'm sorry but I don't think that you understood what I was saying. I was understanding consequentialism as the view that we are morally required to bring about the most impartial good, or to bring about the most well-being (i you don't have any fancy views about the underivative value of different sorts of distribution - e.g. the Prioritarian view that it's intrinsically more morally urgent to benefit the worse off - independent of the effects of the diminishing marginal benefits of distribution - see e.g. Parfit's "Equality and Priority"). What I was saying is that consequentialists are quite correct that all else held equal one is morally required to give up one's own lesser good for the greater good of others. What I was saying is that I think one can also be required to give up one's own greater good for the lesser good of others in the context of affiliative duties, promises, and duties of restitution. So yes, it is of course (all else held equal) not OK to cause 10 units of suffering to others for 11 units of pleasure for oneself - even non-consequentialists agree with that (indeed, it's reinforced if duties of non-maleficence are stronger than duties of beneficence, and reinforced further on fancy asymmetric views about the relative dis-value and value of suffering and enjoyment, like those held by G.E. Moore and Jamie Meyerfeld - see e.g. Tom Hurka's "Asymmetries in Value" - which are equally available to consequentialists and non-consequentialists). What I was saying was that one can also be required to give up, e.g. 10 units of well-being for oneself in order to confer 8 units of well-being on someone else, because she might be your child, or someone to whom you've made a promise, or someone you've wronged in the past and is now owed your restitution. Again: I could be wrong. But unlike the idea that duties of non-maleficence are in themselves stronger than duties of beneficence, this is not something where my current normative ethical reflection suggests that Henry Sidgwick is in the right and W.D. Ross is in the wrong.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 am The force of Singer's arguments in Famine Affluence and Morality and All Animals are Equal do not depend in the very least whether one is a consequentialist or a non-consequentialist in normative ethics nor whether one is a constructivist, non-naturalist, or expressivist quasi-realist in metaethics.

I disagree; they only have "force" in the most superficial sense of if you arbitrarily agree with the premises, but nothing in these meta-ethics compels agreement with the premises (that's a big problem).
The point is that these arguments can not be deductively substantiated in all systems from the meta-ethics, and if they can't then they're nothing short of arbitrary declarations that people can just as easily reject as accept based on their preferences.

The fact that somebody may consider something temporarily persuasive is irrelevant: my question is one of foundation. I'm looking for incontrovertibility.
We could persuade somebody of something based on some kind of scriptural interpretation too, but that doesn't guarantee any kind of stability because they could change religions, or simply read the scripture differently. There's nothing that logically necessitates a certain interpretation, or logically demands that religion.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amIf you talk to real-world consequentialists and non-consequentialists, like Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, they would readily admit that the force of these arguments wouldn't be altered at all if they converted to the normative ethical views of the other.

That presumes that these perspectives themselves are capable of issuing normative claims with the same force at all. I do not agree that they are.
Non-consequentialist systems aren't really coherent by their nature. If you prop them up with enough complex arbitrary ad hoc rules to force them to work they become increasingly absurd and decreasingly convincing as a natural foundation for ethics; a tower of assumptions easily toppled, likely leaving the ex-adherent stuck in some form of nihilism to spite the charade.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amand note this carefully: Peter Singer, like the Sidgwick to Ewing school before him, is a non-naturalist; see e.g. his recent book with de Lazari-Radek on The Point of View of the Universe

The last I heard he was a classical utilitarian of some kind, having waffled back from preference utilitarianism.
I would call satisfaction of preferences or interests natural too, since it's a state that corresponds to something empirically real.

If you want to stretch the definition of non-naturalism to include idealized interests, despite there being some evidently objective and empirical methods to arrive at those, I guess, but I don't think that qualifies as Moore defined it (or in the way he claimed it couldn't be defined), or any other definition I've seen.

Maybe you're going by something more contemporary?

SEP lays out a few: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/

Very roughly, non-naturalism in meta-ethics is the idea that moral philosophy is fundamentally autonomous from the natural sciences.

Something I could not disagree with more. Such distinctions leave morality without objective foundation, abandoning it as either magical gnosis or subjective whim.

Assuming non-naturalistic moral beliefs are theistic is charitable, because for an atheist we're talking about something much worse.

More accurately, a family of related but distinct doctrines has gone under the heading ‘non-naturalism’. In some contexts, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the semantic thesis that moral predicates cannot be analyzed in non-normative terms (see Shaver 2000 and Gibbard 2002: 153).

This is less clear, and I don't think it's really useful since again it degrades into subjectivism or gnosis. There are also serious metaphysical issues with "shoulds" in themselves as related to determinism.

In other contexts, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the epistemological thesis that knowledge of basic moral principles and value judgements are in some sense self-evident (see Frankena 1963: 85–86). However, this view (which some self-styled naturalists would actually accept) is more often and more usefully referred to as ‘intuitionism’ and I shall henceforth also refer to it as such.

Again, down to some kind of magical intuition or gnosis. These are not reasoned arguments, they're faith based assertions.

Most often, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the metaphysical thesis that moral properties exist and are not identical with or reducible to any natural property or properties in some interesting sense of ‘natural’.[...]

Bingo. It's fundamentally a metaphysical belief in a supernatural substance of morality if it is in any way substantial.
I think any atheist who claims to be a non-naturalist is by nature being intellectually dishonest, in the very least by dodging the only meaningful question at hand.

And if Singer has claimed this (he has said some odd things in the past) I would say the same of whatever his views have evolved into.

This part was well said:

Moreover, each of these different conceptions of non-naturalism bears interesting relations of support to the others. For example, a prima facie plausible explanation of the alleged immunity of moral predicates from analysis in non-normative terms (non-naturalism in the first sense) would be that moral predicates denote non-natural properties (which entails non-naturalism in the third sense). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Moore accepted non-naturalism in all three of these senses. Because non-naturalism is far more often understood in the third of these three ways I shall henceforth use ‘non-naturalism’ with the third of these three meanings unless otherwise noted.

No notion exists in a vacuum; these philosophical claims have substantial implications which are far reaching (much farther than some of the philosophers who claim to hold them would like to believe; they'd like to have their non-naturalism and their atheism too).

Re: Singer, can't say that would be very surprising given how incoherent his views sometimes are, but it's definitely not useful to weasel out of defining moral good by calling it its own magical thing that can't be reduced to anything else; without theistic mandate, that is in practice just subjectivism by another name since it's not only unsubstantiated but undefined and asserted to be undefinable in any useful objective way with respect to reason and empirical reality.

I won't go into my background, but bear in mind I'm coming from a hard science perspective first and sophistry like this is what causes rational people to have such contempt for philosophy (as I did in my misspent youth).

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amIf you talk to real-world constructivists like Sharon Street, real world non-naturalists [...] and real world expressivist quasi-realists like Allan Gibbard, they would readily admit that the force of these arguments wouldn't be altered at all if they converted to the meta-ethical views of the others.

I'm sure you could get them to admit that, but that doesn't mean it's actually true, and the fact that they hold these views at all doesn't inspire much confidence in their ability to employ reason properly.

I'm sure you could find Christians who would say the rectitude of some of their beliefs wouldn't be altered by any horizontal conversion into another theistic faith too. Doesn't mean they have any idea what they're talking about or have the slightest notion of the implications of such a shift.
The bottom line for me is that these beliefs don't substantiate anything or deductively entail anything, at best they're ad hoc narratives that provide the language to rationalize beliefs, but like scripture they can be just as convincingly applied to the opposite conclusion with the difference in subjective interpretation.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amAs to what you mean by naturalistic moral realism: can you just explain what you take that view to hold? I'm still not sure what you mean by that phrase.

Realism: People are expressing propositions, and some of them are true or false. (At least the minimal sense of realism)
Naturalistic: The meaning of good can be clearly defined in relation to empirical properties.

That is, it's not some magical metaphysical thing of its own sensed through gnosis "intuition", or anything else I responded to above. There may be some definitions that straddle the line or create ambiguity between what is natural and not (as I understand, some claim that divine command would be natural, or that "sin" would be a natural property if it were metaphysically real). You can probably stretch the respective definitions to overlap them completely, and I recognize that there may be no distinction once thy're broken down enough, but I mean them only in the useful sense where that is not done (and I'm not certain it can be credibly done since there may be some fundamental difference these terms get at).

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amUnfortunately I do not think that my actual evidence that the ingredients of consequentilaism are true (e.g. a principle of beneficence according to which we have strong moral reasons to promote the well-being of others) differs in kind from my evidence for the existence of these special obligations

What "evidence" do you mean? Are you talking about intuition, or word usage?

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amthat the principles remain most plausible after critical clarification of what they are really saying and what they entail in various contexts, in comparison with rival sets of principles.

Plausibility shouldn't really have much to do with it beyond the linguistics of what labels we give these things.

The question we should be asking is whether these ideas are actually systems, that is proper functions; can we derive anything meaningful from them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_%28mathematics%29

In mathematics, a function[1] is a relation between a set of inputs and a set of permissible outputs with the property that each input is related to exactly one output.

If a proposed moral theory does not allow us to deduce output that doesn't contradict equally valid output, if it's not a proper function, it doesn't generate any rationally compelling normative claims (maybe emotionally compelling for people who want to believe it, but it has no rational force), in effect it's just another formulation of dressed up subjectivism.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amBut I could well be wrong, and it could be, as Sidgwick argued, that only the contents of consequentialism remain most plausible after maximal critical normative-ethical reflection.

Well, they're the only ones that generate workable functions. Likewise, naturalistic realism is the only thing that's going to lead you there.
If a Meta-ethical hypothesis does not lead fairly uncontroversially (or can not be well argued to do so) to some very specific normative heuristic it's just not a viable function.

I think you may have been missing the forest through the trees here; sometimes people get too bogged down in theory to realize most of these fail profoundly upon any attempted application.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amFor instance if there isn't a plausible way to understand affiliative special obligations

It should be enough to say it's not plausible because you have to construct bizarre ad hoc systems to justify them which fail at the basic requirement to serve as rationally compelling functions that let us learn anything at all.
It's not plausible if it can not be done in the context of naturalistic realism. And if it can, then we should argue for that mechanism if that's where the empirical evidence points (but then we're beyond the point of sitting around and talking about things and into actual scientific work, which is something many philosophers seem loathe to admit, perhaps because it would make their jobs much less important).

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amIt's just that, from what I've been able to determine so far, underivative special obligations still seem plausible - as plausible as the underivative duties of beneficence that exhaust the contents of morality on consequentialism).

Your view of plausibility, I think, is overly broad.

People claim the Christian God is plausible too, without looking into the implications too carefully. Try to deconstruct them a bit more, and I think you'll find the foundations you see these as plausible within do not hold up.

That said, they're perfectly plausible in a naturalistic realist perspective, although they may not be true depending on what the evidence says.

Human psychology says a lot about what is more or less difficult for us, and difficulty of pursuing an action says a lot about duty to follow through with it in a normative sense of allowing us to condemn character.
Tossing a life preserver into a pool vs. leaping into a raging river to save somebody from drowning; the effect it the same for the victim, but demanded input is much higher in the latter case.

We can understand mitigating excuses like self preservation, and so too can we understand psychologically compelling duties like loyalty and family as excuses even if they aren't morally mandated. The idea that we might have more obligation in certain situations can also hold up to scrutiny if there's evidence of social utility.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amI'm sorry but I don't think that you understood what I was saying. I was understanding consequentialism as the view that we are morally required to bring about the most impartial good, or to bring about the most well-being

With respect to the definition of good outcomes consequentialism is very consistent on this point, but there are different ways to interpret judgement of character and duty within that context that people often overlook (different baselines or averages).
Just because we know what good looks like does not mean it's that simple to know what a good person looks like.

There is not just an absolute shit person and a perfect person, and nothing in between (I think this is the mistake AtheneWins has made in the past). We can normalize and assess character in different ways, and I think there's an under-appreciation of that fact with respect to normative force.

Somebody might be strongly compelled to be neutral or slightly good, very strongly compelled to not be a bad person, but maybe more weakly compelled to be perfect.

Most people want to be good people, but may not be motivated to be perfect people, and we can talk very meaningfully about what that means.
We can understand a "should" in global terms of most preferred states of reality as a consequence of your actions while still respecting the nature of practical heuristics in informing behavior.
The greatest good is not necessarily an overly taxing demand for perfection.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amWhat I was saying was that one can also be required to give up, e.g. 10 units of well-being for oneself in order to confer 8 units of well-being on someone else

Of course, and that is in line with an altruistic interpretation.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 ambecause she might be your child, or someone to whom you've made a promise, or someone you've wronged in the past and is now owed your restitution.

...But this in itself would not determine that.

The question is in burning out or in self destruction which prevents you from doing greater good. The issue is a psychological one, and perception of duty may influence that, but is not in itself a real thing unless there's an element of overriding social utility to it: that is, we did the math wrong, or incorrectly regarded the situation as occurring in a bubble when there were more units of well being created lost or shuffled around by the action than we anticipated.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amAgain: I could be wrong. But unlike the idea that duties of non-maleficence are in themselves stronger than duties of beneficence, this is not something where my current normative ethical reflection suggests that Henry Sidgwick is in the right and W.D. Ross is in the wrong.

I have never encountered an issue with consequentialism that wasn't just an oversight, either missing harms or benefits, or mistaking the general good with personal assessment of character.
I have run into some bizarrely steadfast assertions of hedonism, but that's something else.

Either way, if there were such a case that intuitive reflection differed sharply from what is deduced it is not only possible, but by necessity must be so if morality has meaning, that our intuitions are simply wrong, and that deduction in ethics through the only route that provides a coherent function for evaluation (not intuition) has corrected our false assumptions. I think choosing another arbitrary or subjective meta-ethic because we don't like the logical conclusions of the only one that actually serves any meaningful purpose in providing objective determination of morality would be intellectually dishonest.

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:35 pm

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 am The force of Singer's arguments in Famine Affluence and Morality and All Animals are Equal do not depend in the very least whether one is a consequentialist or a non-consequentialist in normative ethics nor whether one is a constructivist, non-naturalist, or expressivist quasi-realist in metaethics.

I disagree; they only have "force" in the most superficial sense of if you arbitrarily agree with the premises, but nothing in these meta-ethics compels agreement with the premises (that's a big problem).
The point is that these arguments can not be deductively substantiated in all systems from the meta-ethics, and if they can't then they're nothing short of arbitrary declarations that people can just as easily reject as accept based on their preferences.

The fact that somebody may consider something temporarily persuasive is irrelevant: my question is one of foundation. I'm looking for incontrovertibility.
We could persuade somebody of something based on some kind of scriptural interpretation too, but that doesn't guarantee any kind of stability because they could change religions, or simply read the scripture differently. There's nothing that logically necessitates a certain interpretation, or logically demands that religion.

In basic ethics - i.e. in trying to determine not what is instrumentally good or right, but instead underrivatively or intrinsically good or right, there is nothing to go on but intuitions about what features are good / right making in various cases and intuitions about what principles regarding what is good / right seem true. What would your empirical evidence be that suffering is intrinsically bad, or that the fulfillment of preferences is intrinsically good, or that what it's right to do is to bring about the best outcomes? These simply are not the sort of things that can be settled by empirical inquiry. Of course once we settle - using intuitions of some sort or other (hopefully more reflective and more general) - on what things (e.g. suffering, preference fulfillment, bringing about the best outcomes, what have you) have the distinct properties of being intrinsically good / bad / right / wrong, then we must of course use empirical science to determine what specific things best instrumentally or constitutively bring about / constitute what is intrinsically good / bad / right / wrong.

The whole point of metaethics is to make sense of what we are doing when we engage in this intuitive enterprise in substantive and normative ethics in trying to get at what is INTRINSICALLY good / bad / right / wrong (not how we determine what is instrumentally / constitutively right / wrong given certain assumptions about what is intrinsically good / bad / right / wrong). There isn't anything more to be had in this domain. There simply isn't any alternative to using ethical intuitions to get at what is intrinsically good / bad / right / wrong, and it's completely foundational to this practice of determining what is intrinsically good / bad / right / wrong, which isn't straightforwardly empirical at all. That's entirely unlike using theistic empirical intuitions or whatever to get at empirical reality - as there's an alternative and much better way to know things about empirical reality, which is science (and epistemology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics, but really just in the service of best interpreting the findings of empirical science).

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amIf you talk to real-world consequentialists and non-consequentialists, like Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, they would readily admit that the force of these arguments wouldn't be altered at all if they converted to the normative ethical views of the other.

That presumes that these perspectives themselves are capable of issuing normative claims with the same force at all. I do not agree that they are.
Non-consequentialist systems aren't really coherent by their nature. If you prop them up with enough complex arbitrary ad hoc rules to force them to work they become increasingly absurd and decreasingly convincing as a natural foundation for ethics; a tower of assumptions easily toppled, likely leaving the ex-adherent stuck in some form of nihilism to spite the charade.

The only sense worth recognizing in which an ethical claim about intrinsic right / wrong / good / bad can be 'arbitrary' or 'ad hoc' is if it doesn't comport with the right intuitions about what really is right / wrong / good / bad (which hopefully uses reflective intuitions and very general ones - on this see e.g. Sidgwick). Since the claims in Famine Affluence & Morality & All Animals are Equal comport with the most solid and reflective intuitions, they are by no means arbitrary in this only sense worth recognizing.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amand note this carefully: Peter Singer, like the Sidgwick to Ewing school before him, is a non-naturalist; see e.g. his recent book with de Lazari-Radek on The Point of View of the Universe

The last I heard he was a classical utilitarian of some kind, having waffled back from preference utilitarianism.
I would call satisfaction of preferences or interests natural too, since it's a state that corresponds to something empirically real.

This sounds confused. Like Sidgwick, Singer is a classical utilitarian in normative ethics but a non-naturalist in metaethics (before he was a preference utilitarian in normative ethics and went between some kind of Hare-like expressivism and non-naturalism in metaethics). That is, what is intrinsically good is enjoyment, what is intrinsically bad is suffering, and what it is right to do is to bring about the most good possible (that's the normative ethics), and these substantive ethical truths (e.g. that suffering is what's intrinsically bad) are basic facts, not reducible to any naturalistic facts (and by the way quasi-realist expressivism isn't right about what we're doing when we call it a fact - you need that to rule out being an expressivist quasi-realist.

If you want to stretch the definition of non-naturalism to include idealized interests, despite there being some evidently objective and empirical methods to arrive at those, I guess, but I don't think that qualifies as Moore defined it (or in the way he claimed it couldn't be defined), or any other definition I've seen.

Actually Moore was just developing a position articulated much more briefly in Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics. They're both non-naturalists in the exact same way - and that's the way in which Singer today is a non-naturalist.

Maybe you're going by something more contemporary?

SEP lays out a few: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/

Yes, precisely - that's it exactly.

Very roughly, non-naturalism in meta-ethics is the idea that moral philosophy is fundamentally autonomous from the natural sciences.

Something I could not disagree with more. Such distinctions leave morality without objective foundation, abandoning it as either magical gnosis or subjective whim.

Assuming non-naturalistic moral beliefs are theistic is charitable, because for an atheist we're talking about something much worse.

You can call it names all you like, but there are no foundations of the kind you wish for to be had. That's the expert consensus in metaethics. If you have an argument against it that's fine. But if you have one I suggest that you publish it. I'm sure that everyone would be thrilled if it's compelling. And you do have arguments for your view, right? You're not just calling everyone names like 'religious' and 'even worse than theists' without one - we wouldn't want to see any Dunning Kruger dynamics here, would we? (Sorry - I'm only letting myself talk this frankly because you seem to have indicated that you can take it and you like it).

More accurately, a family of related but distinct doctrines has gone under the heading ‘non-naturalism’. In some contexts, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the semantic thesis that moral predicates cannot be analyzed in non-normative terms (see Shaver 2000 and Gibbard 2002: 153).

This is less clear, and I don't think it's really useful since again it degrades into subjectivism or gnosis. There are also serious metaphysical issues with "shoulds" in themselves as related to determinism.

In other contexts, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the epistemological thesis that knowledge of basic moral principles and value judgements are in some sense self-evident (see Frankena 1963: 85–86). However, this view (which some self-styled naturalists would actually accept) is more often and more usefully referred to as ‘intuitionism’ and I shall henceforth also refer to it as such.

Again, down to some kind of magical intuition or gnosis. These are not reasoned arguments, they're faith based assertions.

Since there's no alternative to using intuitions to determine what is INTRINSICALLY good / bad / right / wrong, the insults of 'magical', 'gnosis' , and 'faith-based' isn't an argument against it. What reasoned arguments in ethics do is seek to show that the most reflective intuitions support certain claims - Singer's argument in All Animals are Equal is a textbook case, as are standard arguments against the view that doing harm is inherently harder to justify than allowing it (which employ such things as trolley cases and such).

Most often, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the metaphysical thesis that moral properties exist and are not identical with or reducible to any natural property or properties in some interesting sense of ‘natural’.[...]

Bingo. It's fundamentally a metaphysical belief in a supernatural substance of morality if it is in any way substantial.
I think any atheist who claims to be a non-naturalist is by nature being intellectually dishonest, in the very least by dodging the only meaningful question at hand.

And if Singer has claimed this (he has said some odd things in the past) I would say the same of whatever his views have evolved into.

This part was well said:

Moreover, each of these different conceptions of non-naturalism bears interesting relations of support to the others. For example, a prima facie plausible explanation of the alleged immunity of moral predicates from analysis in non-normative terms (non-naturalism in the first sense) would be that moral predicates denote non-natural properties (which entails non-naturalism in the third sense). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Moore accepted non-naturalism in all three of these senses. Because non-naturalism is far more often understood in the third of these three ways I shall henceforth use ‘non-naturalism’ with the third of these three meanings unless otherwise noted.

No notion exists in a vacuum; these philosophical claims have substantial implications which are far reaching (much farther than some of the philosophers who claim to hold them would like to believe; they'd like to have their non-naturalism and their atheism too).

I don't know what you mean here. As I've pointed out, plenty of non-naturalists in the past have been consequentialists and non-consequentialists; they've also taken different views about the good: Sidwick (classical hedonist) Moore (objective-list like thing with organic unities the goodness of which isn't reducible to the sum of the parts, and such) Ross (an even more pluralist objective list) and so on. And you can do it with contemporary philosophers: Singer: consequentialist hedonist sum-ranker (classical utilitarian), Parfit: rule consequentilaist about the right, prioirtarian about distribution, probably an objective list theorist about well-being, McMahan: Rossian-pluralist like / moderate deontology about what's right, prioritarian about distribution, objective list about well being. They're all non-naturalists, and they represent just about every interesting normative ethical view. So no, I just don't see it placing any constraints.

I think that the main practical importance of good metaethics is to give the best account of how ethical practice can fit into our picture of what there is without any bad metaethical view, which claims to have supra-intuitive substantive implications (like certain forms of divine command theory, or Gauthier error theory + contractarian reform) being the best metaethical account. E.g. explaining why the Mackie / Gauthier error theory + contractarianism move doesn't work has real implications for animal ethics, as we've discussed. But which of the non-dangerous main metaethical views is true: constructivism, expressivist quasi-realism, or non-naturalism - doesn't I think have much practical importance. I think it matters what their advantages and disadvantages are, since I think this is important for showing why the dangerous bad views are wrong. But their relative advantages don't really matter apart from that.

Re: Singer, can't say that would be very surprising given how incoherent his views sometimes are, but it's definitely not useful to weasel out of defining moral good by calling it its own magical thing that can't be reduced to anything else; without theistic mandate, that is in practice just subjectivism by another name since it's not only unsubstantiated but undefined and asserted to be undefinable in any useful objective way with respect to reason and empirical reality.

I'm not sure what these insults are getting at; the argument for contemporary, secular, non-naturalism begins with noting how there isn't any other way to go about reasoning about what's intrinsically good / bad / right / wrong in ethics, notes an analogy to mathematical truths, which many think are basic facts about that can't be reduced to anything studied by the empirical sciences, finds fault with constructivism, quasi-realist expressivism, and error theory, and concludes that it's the best view in town. For a good but lengthy example of this see maybe the second volume of Parfit's On What Matters.

I won't go into my background, but bear in mind I'm coming from a hard science perspective first and sophistry like this is what causes rational people to have such contempt for philosophy (as I did in my misspent youth).

That's fine; it just doesn't seem to me that you've appreciated the issues with making sense of basic ethics / what is going on with our reasoning about what's intrinsically right / wrong / good / bad, and how certain things that I think you think are options are not really options. It sounds to me like you want what Isaac and Korsgaard want: some sort of deductive proof of substantive ethical claims from something incontrovertable like the fact that you're deliberating or that you don't want to be harmed. Given that you appreciate that their views don't work, I'm not sure what you want or what you think you can have other than using intuition to establish basic ethical claims about what's INTRINSICALLY good / bad / right / wrong. It sounds to me like you just want to skip all of that, start with assumptions about what's intrinsically right / wrong / good / bad, make a really big deal about using empirical science to determine what's instrumentally / constitutively right / wrong / good / bad given those assumptions (and maybe call that applied enterprise your metaethics and normative ethics), and then if anyone questions those assumptions you call them a bunch of names and insist that your assumptions were deductively arrived at (how?) You seem to be long on insult for professionals who work on this stuff and short on evidence (in the form of philosophical arguments - or even just explanations of what your view is supposed to be) as to why all of the experts are wrong and you alone are right. Again, if you're so sure, write it up and submit it to a journal.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amIf you talk to real-world constructivists like Sharon Street, real world non-naturalists [...] and real world expressivist quasi-realists like Allan Gibbard, they would readily admit that the force of these arguments wouldn't be altered at all if they converted to the meta-ethical views of the others.

I'm sure you could get them to admit that, but that doesn't mean it's actually true, and the fact that they hold these views at all doesn't inspire much confidence in their ability to employ reason properly.

I'm sure you could find Christians who would say the rectitude of some of their beliefs wouldn't be altered by any horizontal conversion into another theistic faith too. Doesn't mean they have any idea what they're talking about or have the slightest notion of the implications of such a shift.
The bottom line for me is that these beliefs don't substantiate anything or deductively entail anything, at best they're ad hoc narratives that provide the language to rationalize beliefs, but like scripture they can be just as convincingly applied to the opposite conclusion with the difference in subjective interpretation.

Wow; you must have some really knock down arguments against all of the leading figures in contemporary metaethics. Please do make sure to submit them for publication. There's no hint of Dunning-Kruger dynamics here, is there?

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amAs to what you mean by naturalistic moral realism: can you just explain what you take that view to hold? I'm still not sure what you mean by that phrase.

Realism: People are expressing propositions, and some of them are true or false. (At least the minimal sense of realism)

That really is very minimal: all three of non-naturalists, constructivists, and quasi-realist expressivists accept that.

Naturalistic: The meaning of good can be clearly defined in relation to empirical properties.

Can you explain what you mean by 'defined'? On one reading adherents of every metaethical view will agree with that, since they will all agree that ethical properties supervene on empirical properties, or that one can give an account (i.e. a substantive normative ethical theory) that tells you which empirical properties suffice for which ethical properties (e.g. suffering is intrinsically bad, enjoyment is intrinsically good, etc.)

On another reading it sounds like you're saying that ethical predicates can be analyzed without remainder into emprirical predicates. But that seems really hard to do, for reasons Moore explained and others like Gibbard etc. have amplified.

Incidentally it may help to know that Cornell School realists, whom many refer to as 'naturalistic moral realists' (and mean to distinguish from other reductive descriptivists like dispositionalists and constructivists like Roderick Firth and Sharon Street) don't actually think that ethical terms can be analyzed in naturalistic terms, but that the way they refer to nautralistic things is much like the way in which 'Water' refers to H20 without just meaning / being analyzable in terms of H20 (to recall an earlier discussion where you seemed to think the difference did not matter: it matters a whole heck of a lot to Cornell School realists like Railton and Boyd). So if you're talking about just analyzing the meaning of a term, it may help to know that others who call themselves 'naturalistic moral realists' are talking about something else.

That is, it's not some magical metaphysical thing of its own sensed through gnosis "intuition", or anything else I responded to above.

If hurling insults at the only possible way of getting at what's INTRINSICALLY good / bad / right / wrong constitutes a 'response'....

There may be some definitions that straddle the line or create ambiguity between what is natural and not (as I understand, some claim that divine command would be natural, or that "sin" would be a natural property if it were metaphysically real). You can probably stretch the respective definitions to overlap them completely, and I recognize that there may be no distinction once thy're broken down enough, but I mean them only in the useful sense where that is not done (and I'm not certain it can be credibly done since there may be some fundamental difference these terms get at).

Again, what do you mean by "definitions" here? Substantive accounts developed by your much hated intuition, or attempted analyses of what everyone means? Because if it's the latter it fails. I am e.g. not a consequentialist, so when I say 'right' I do not simply mean 'productive of the best consequences'; if you want to know what's at issue between a consequentialist and myself, you can't say that we're both talking about what's productive of the best consequences. If consequentialism is true that's an interesting substantive fact. It isn't simply a matter of mere meaning.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amUnfortunately I do not think that my actual evidence that the ingredients of consequentilaism are true (e.g. a principle of beneficence according to which we have strong moral reasons to promote the well-being of others) differs in kind from my evidence for the existence of these special obligations

What "evidence" do you mean? Are you talking about intuition, or word usage?

Definitely substantive reflective intuition. Consequentialism most definitely isn't true by the mere meaning of the term 'right'; it's much more interesting and important than that!

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amthat the principles remain most plausible after critical clarification of what they are really saying and what they entail in various contexts, in comparison with rival sets of principles.

Plausibility shouldn't really have much to do with it beyond the linguistics of what labels we give these things.

The question we should be asking is whether these ideas are actually systems, that is proper functions; can we derive anything meaningful from them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_%28mathematics%29

In mathematics, a function[1] is a relation between a set of inputs and a set of permissible outputs with the property that each input is related to exactly one output.

If a proposed moral theory does not allow us to deduce output that doesn't contradict equally valid output, if it's not a proper function, it doesn't generate any rationally compelling normative claims (maybe emotionally compelling for people who want to believe it, but it has no rational force), in effect it's just another formulation of dressed up subjectivism.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amBut I could well be wrong, and it could be, as Sidgwick argued, that only the contents of consequentialism remain most plausible after maximal critical normative-ethical reflection.

Well, they're the only ones that generate workable functions. Likewise, naturalistic realism is the only thing that's going to lead you there.
If a Meta-ethical hypothesis does not lead fairly uncontroversially (or can not be well argued to do so) to some very specific normative heuristic it's just not a viable function.

I think you may have been missing the forest through the trees here; sometimes people get too bogged down in theory to realize most of these fail profoundly upon any attempted application.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Certainly a Rossian Pluralist style system can be developed with precision up to the sort of vagueness that even hedonistic consequentialists have to accept. E.g. there isn't any precise point at which many moments of unintense suffering equal in badness a short amount of very intense torture (see the first volume of Parfit's On What Matters). You can have principles like "reasons not to inflict harm are much stronger than reasons to prevent harm, the stronger the greater the harm, to the point that one can only justify inflicting serious harm (e.g. death for a typical human adult with 60 years life expectancy) for enormously greater benefits (e.g. saving thousands). Or "reasons of beneficence are sufficiently strong that they require one to help others if the cost to one is relatively trivial in relation to the good done." This isn't much different from the sorts of pleasure-pain asymmetries that consequentialists like Moore put in their theories of the good. There is some vagueness in relative triviality and such, but it's of the same kind that even a classical hedonist must tolerate. So really to put it in terms of functions mapping from situations to what there's most reason to do one is going to have to use something like a partial ordering or vague sets; anyway decision theorists have actually worked on things like this. You can look it up under departures from standard / classical decision theory (you can find citations of some of the relevant literature here https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/decision-theory/#ComVagBelDes).

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amFor instance if there isn't a plausible way to understand affiliative special obligations

It should be enough to say it's not plausible because you have to construct bizarre ad hoc systems to justify them which fail at the basic requirement to serve as rationally compelling functions that let us learn anything at all.
It's not plausible if it can not be done in the context of naturalistic realism. And if it can, then we should argue for that mechanism if that's where the empirical evidence points (but then we're beyond the point of sitting around and talking about things and into actual scientific work, which is something many philosophers seem loathe to admit, perhaps because it would make their jobs much less important).

As explained: empirical evidence doesn't get directly at what's INTRINSICALLY good / bad / right / wrong; but sure, it does everything to get from what's intrinsically good / bad / right / wrong to what's instrumentally and constitutively so given those assumptions. Since affiliative obligations are a thesis about what's intrinsically right (that's how most in the literature and I mean it, anyway), empirical evidence has no direct bearing. It could in principle play a role in trying to explain away the relevant intuitions, but I don't think it's going to play much of one, for the same reasons that I don't think that the rational intuitions that support the principle of beneficence are going to get explained away by a set of considerations that include empirical evidence.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amIt's just that, from what I've been able to determine so far, underivative special obligations still seem plausible - as plausible as the underivative duties of beneficence that exhaust the contents of morality on consequentialism).

Your view of plausibility, I think, is overly broad.

People claim the Christian God is plausible too, without looking into the implications too carefully. Try to deconstruct them a bit more, and I think you'll find the foundations you see these as plausible within do not hold up.

That said, they're perfectly plausible in a naturalistic realist perspective, although they may not be true depending on what the evidence says.

Human psychology says a lot about what is more or less difficult for us, and difficulty of pursuing an action says a lot about duty to follow through with it in a normative sense of allowing us to condemn character.
Tossing a life preserver into a pool vs. leaping into a raging river to save somebody from drowning; the effect it the same for the victim, but demanded input is much higher in the latter case.

We can understand mitigating excuses like self preservation, and so too can we understand psychologically compelling duties like loyalty and family as excuses even if they aren't morally mandated. The idea that we might have more obligation in certain situations can also hold up to scrutiny if there's evidence of social utility.

How do we know that we should care about the well-being of someone drowning or social utility in the first place? Rational intuition. It's all there is when it comes to determining what's INTRINSICALLY good / bad / right / wrong. This is once more completely unlike what methods we have to determine how the world works and whether there are gods, spooks, and ghosts.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amI'm sorry but I don't think that you understood what I was saying. I was understanding consequentialism as the view that we are morally required to bring about the most impartial good, or to bring about the most well-being

With respect to the definition of good outcomes consequentialism is very consistent on this point,

As I (and many others) use the term 'consequentialism' it takes no stand at all on what constitutes good outcomes; it just says that whatever these are the right thing to do is to maximally promote them. What is impartially good is another matter of substantive normative ethics on which consequentilaists differ: e.g. Parfit is a Prioritarian, Sidgwick & Singer are sum-rakers; Sidgwick & Singer think well-being is determined just by suffering & enjoyment; Parfit & Moore thinks there's an objective list. But they're all consequentialists.

but there are different ways to interpret judgement of character and duty within that context that people often overlook (different baselines or averages).
Just because we know what good looks like does not mean it's that simple to know what a good person looks like.

There is not just an absolute shit person and a perfect person, and nothing in between (I think this is the mistake AtheneWins has made in the past). We can normalize and assess character in different ways, and I think there's an under-appreciation of that fact with respect to normative force.

Somebody might be strongly compelled to be neutral or slightly good, very strongly compelled to not be a bad person, but maybe more weakly compelled to be perfect.

Most people want to be good people, but may not be motivated to be perfect people, and we can talk very meaningfully about what that means.
We can understand a "should" in global terms of most preferred states of reality as a consequence of your actions while still respecting the nature of practical heuristics in informing behavior.
The greatest good is not necessarily an overly taxing demand for perfection.

I'm not sure what's going on here - I don't think it's actually helpful at all ever to make aretaic assessments of who is a good / bad person; I'm actually inclined to be an error theorist about the entire enterprise (see e.g. Derk Pereboom & Galen Strawson for arguments along these lines). That's cool if you like this stuff, but I don't know why you're talking about it response to anything I was saying.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amWhat I was saying was that one can also be required to give up, e.g. 10 units of well-being for oneself in order to confer 8 units of well-being on someone else

Of course, and that is in line with an altruistic interpretation.

I suppose I don't know what you mean by 'an altruistic interpretation' - clearly it isn't just the view that we're required to bring about the most impartial good.

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 ambecause she might be your child, or someone to whom you've made a promise, or someone you've wronged in the past and is now owed your restitution.

...But this in itself would not determine that.

The question is in burning out or in self destruction which prevents you from doing greater good. The issue is a psychological one, and perception of duty may influence that, but is not in itself a real thing unless there's an element of overriding social utility to it: that is, we did the math wrong, or incorrectly regarded the situation as occurring in a bubble when there were more units of well being created lost or shuffled around by the action than we anticipated.

So that's pretty question-begging in favour of the view that the morally right thing to do is just to maximize social utility (i.e. utility for all sentient beings, not just the ones in some vague sense in one's "society", right?). I'm sorry but for the reasons I've explained I don't think there's anything more in favour of the view that there's reason to promote the impartial good than rational intuition, and I think still at this point think there's rational intuition on the side of some intrinsic special obligations, so I see no asymmetry whatsoever. This sort of thing can only be settled by detailed normative ethics, not sitting back, assuming the truth of one's normative view, and calling the other side names.

what is deduced it is not only possible, but by necessity must be so if morality has meaning,

So, what is that? How does that work? Why are all professional non-naturalists, constructivists, and expressivists idiots whose accounts of what ethical claims mean are just so totally and obviously wrong that they're not just giving implausible accounts of the meaning of moral terms but on their views moral terms actually (despite their clear explanations to the contrary) have NO MEANING? How does this Isaac-Korsgaard-style deductively necessary normative ethics work? Why haven't you published it and become the most famous metaethicist in the world? It couldn't be that old Dunning Kruger thing, could it?

Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2017 1:36 am So, what is that? How does that work? Why are all professional non-naturalists, constructivists, and expressivists idiots whose accounts of what ethical claims mean are just so totally and obviously wrong that they're not just giving implausible accounts of the meaning of moral terms but on their views moral terms actually (despite their clear explanations to the contrary) have NO MEANING? How does this Isaac-Korsgaard-style deductively necessary normative ethics work? Why haven't you published it and become the most famous metaethicist in the world? It couldn't be that old Dunning Kruger thing, could it?

Margaret, you fall into this tone a lot. Little implicit insults and sarcastic quips abound in this post, this was just kind of your capstone.
I think you might be overestimating the ease of a neutral tone if you think you frequently use it.

Don't get me wrong, that's fine. You drastically mistake my claims here, though; I'm not advocating anything that hasn't been long argued, and I don't know if I could do it any better than others (maybe I can, and if at any point I feel like I have a compelling enough argument that I think it will persuade people where others have failed maybe I will try).
I find that unlikely, though. Even religion is still around, after all, and even considered credible as a philosophical perspective by many, and most god concepts are logically incoherent.
Philosophers aren't always overly concerned with reality or what is meaningful in natural terms, and there is certainly a bias in the vocation to have these great "original" ideas, which results in a kind of creeping absurdity which seems to be rewarded.

That, and an obsession with history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLvWz9GQ3PQ (Carrier is terrible in almost every other way, but that was a pretty good talk)

Now I'm not worried enough to condemn the entire field...
https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

Accept or lean toward: moral realism 525 / 931 (56.4%)
Accept or lean toward: moral anti-realism 258 / 931 (27.7%)
Other 148 / 931 (15.9%)

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

Accept or lean toward: naturalism 464 / 931 (49.8%)
Accept or lean toward: non-naturalism 241 / 931 (25.9%)
Other 226 / 931 (24.3%)

I think reasonable positions are extremely popular, and in many cases make up the majority (and probably a growing one, although we have limited data to assess that). ...But it is an issue.

That said, you're using non-naturalism in a way that is a bit alien to me.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/

There may be as much philosophical controversy about how to distinguish naturalism from non-naturalism as there is about which view is correct.

I already agreed that there may be substantial overlap in usage, and there may even be no true distinction (although I doubt this, I'm not about to go through the work of arguing or proving it since that's not the main issue).

If you are using non-naturalism and naturalism in a certain way, it would be great if you would provide clearer definitions, and quote and link some mainstream source on them so I can see that they are common ones.

If non-naturalism has indeed crept into and subsumed such natural definitions of good as hedonistic pleasure itself (as you seem to imply), then clearly the battle is lost: the distinction is irrelevant, and we will have to find something else to argue over.

I mainly read SEP because it's convenient.
This passage may provide insight, and reflects well my concerns as well as a fair assessment of the advantages and disadvantages to each approach:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/#Int

How can we come to know anything about non-natural properties? The question is a reasonable one on any of the myriad ways in which non-natural properties have been conceived. On many characterizations, non-natural properties by definition elude scientific investigation which many take to be the most reliable form of knowledge available to us. On other characterizations, non-natural properties are causally inert which makes it hard to see how we could reliably detect them.

At least two kinds of questions are relevant here. First, once we have a particular property in mind how can we know it is a moral one? Second, how do we come to know anything about moral properties apart from knowing they are moral? The first question might seem more difficult for the naturalist than for some non-naturalists; if goodness really is a sui generis non-natural property then perhaps being directly acquainted with it is sufficient for recognizing it as moral. The second question, though, is easier for the naturalist than the non-naturalist. Since the naturalist holds that moral properties are either identical to or reducible to some subset of natural properties there need be no mystery about how we come to have some knowledge of those properties even if there is some residual mystery as to how we discover that they are the moral ones. Or, at least, a commitment to naturalism in meta-ethics introduces no new problems about how we come to know anything about these properties. For given naturalism, the moral properties might well be identical to or reducible to familiar properties like the property of promoting happiness or the property of being truthful. In general we learn about such natural properties through observation and scientific inquiry and the naturalist can “piggy back” on whatever more general epistemological theory explains our ability to come to know anything about those properties.[/b] We learn, for example, what kinds of upbringing promote honesty through empirical observation and theorizing. Non-naturalism can be understood in many different ways, but none seems to make the task of explaining the possibility of moral knowledge as straightforward as it seems to be for the naturalist.

Of course, I don't believe intuitionism is defensible; I see it as nothing short of fideistic/revealed religious mentality minus the trappings of supersition, as a distilled personal bias.

You can ask a naturalist, particularly a non-intuitionist, how we come to know what good is to be able to define it in terms of natural properties, and that is a fair and reasonable question. If we can not, perhaps the error theorists are right after all.
The answer to a possible inability to do that is not to fall back on dark age theology, essentially appealing to the fruit of the tree of magical gnosis of good and evil, and call it reasoned philosophy. I believe that is sophistry. It's rewriting the rules of the game to get the answer we want when we'd never accept that kind of reasoning in science (unless we're arguing for letting theology into the science classroom now).

I think you're quite missing my point on all of this; I'm speaking to a deeper methodology of how we come to believe things, and relying on intuition is a very bad one. That's no less true of morality than of anything else of objective meaning and value.
Now if you're a strict subjectivist and you accept that a psychopath's moral intuition may be radically different (but no less true) than your own then that polling of intuition can work to give you what you're after, but I don't accept that line of reasoning and I think subjectivism is about the worst way to create normative force for arguments since it's easily defeated by "I don't care" or "my personal morality differs".

If you don't agree with that, and you still favor other meta-ethics, I doubt I can present any arguments that you haven't already heard.
We may have more luck with a real-time text chat to avoid speaking at any length where there's already agreement or talking past one another (we could arrange a time to chat on discord if you are available), but aside from that this isn't likely to resolve anything.

I agree that if we have an argument that is effective for objectivists and appeals to subjectivists too as a side effect then that's fine, but I don't put much stock in building infrastructure on what amounts to quicksand that can easily shift with a changing mood, so I'm not inclined to give such an argument any favoritism over an argument that assumes an objective framework and alienates subjectivists if that argument is even the slightest bit stronger for its target audience.

Does that make sense?

I split off these posts, since they were making the other thread harder to read.

I may post back later with a brief summary of the arguments that connect morality to natural properties and the arguments surrounding "oughts" as connected to that (all of which you have probably heard and already rejected, but I should summarize them here for others), as well as some pragmatic arguments for disfavoring intuition as a source of moral authority (which you may not have heard).

PV what are your metaethical views?

It seems to me that if you agree with the is-ought distinction (one might not), then any moral facts you believe to be true must be self-evident and a priori e.g. one might say that which is desired is good, is an a priori, self evident, moral truth. something like that.

I'm not that well versed in metaethics so if you could point me to a view that you find compelling I would be interested to read about it

DrSinger wrote: ↑Mon Dec 25, 2017 1:14 pm PV what are your metaethical views?

Margaret and I went into it a bit here too, that will probably help:
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3686&p=35785#p35781

My metaethical views are basically that most metaethics is nonsensical: internally inconsistent, or faith based and thus can't be substantiated (intuitionistic nonsense, which I think is as intellectually dishonest as Biblical fideism, which as a non-theist I'm not into: it's why I didn't get into theism, and I'm not interested in recreating that with secular ethics).
I can briefly state it as naturalistic moral realism (at least minimal realism), and consequentialism based on preferences.
That's of limited use, though, since naturalism can mean a lot of things, and so can realism, and we can ask some serious questions about how to idealize preferences.

DrSinger wrote: ↑Mon Dec 25, 2017 1:14 pmIt seems to me that if you agree with the is-ought distinction (one might not), then any moral facts you believe to be true must be self-evident and a priori e.g. one might say that which is desired is good, is an a priori, self evident, moral truth. something like that.

I don't necessarily agree with the is-ought distinction, but it depends on how you define it.

Ought a knife be sharp? Given what a knife is for, and that sharpness is essential to that, yes.

We can also talk about conditional oughts/oughts with context. IF you want to be moral, you ought (moral ought) to do X.
IF you want to make a profit, you ought (fiscal ought) to do X.

Ought on its own has an implication that it is a moral ought, so this may just be semantic.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/5u2/pluralistic_moral_reductionism/

This seems very similar to your views, both in terms of morality and perspective on philosophy (is it actually?). I am inclined to agree with something similar.

That the meaning of moral, good etc. is constrained to mean certain things which can be expressed in terms of natural facts, but due to the ambiguity of its folk meaning there is no implied 'correct morality', but there are nonetheless things it cannot be.

My concern is that this would leave us with the question of 'which is the best morality from those which it can be?', I'm not sure how that could be answered, perhaps through 'reflective equilibrium' or a concept of self-evidence, I am not sure. Perhaps we could only say something falls within certain definitions.