The fact that 2600 years of analysis of ethics has demonstrated inductively that we can't answer the traditional ethical questions tells us one primary thing...much like the fact that after 250 years of epistemology, we can't answer the core question "How do we determine what is true?".
What both failures tell us is that we're either asking the wrong question, or using the wrong tools.
In Epistemology, I'm comfortable not only identifying the correct question:
What should we believe?But also answering it:
For roughly all goals, the correct answer is a combination ofIn Ethics...I haven't solved the corresponding problem. "What is good?" or even "What does 'good' mean?" are highly unclear questions. After 2600 years, serious philosophers basically cannot even agree on what the words mean. Really...put an ethical intuitionist, an ethical relativist, an emotivist, and a divine-command advocate in the room...and listen to them try to agree on the topic of ethics. Feel free to leave after the first several hours of argument.
- "What my tribe believes?"
- "What predicts best?"
- Statistically
I can surround some answers to three related questions:
What ethics are "natural" to the human being?
- A sense of justice/fairness has been observed in pre-lingual infants. Sometime before 9 months, children were shown a puppet who was mean to a nice puppet. Babies almost universally prefer to be nice to nice puppets, and to be mean to mean puppets.
- Jon Haidt has determined that there's a fairly clear, apparently built-in set of moral axes we're prepared to respond along...but they seem to be much like the language faculty...a set of abilities that require specific inputs to be activated. As always, the (updated) 6 moral axes are: Harm, Fairness, Liberty, Authority, Sanctity, Loyalty
- Other folks have determined that which moral axes you respond to most strongly has a lot to do with brain chemistry. Psychopaths have (roughly) no social fear response, and low empathy. More active amygdala's lead to greater us-them thinking, and more concern with Haidt's Authority, Sanctity, and Loyalty axes.
- Ethics appear to be, like all other mental activity (See Haidt, Kurzban, Hanson, Kahneman, DeSteno/Valdesoto, etc.) massively context-dependent...and used in a highly self-interested way (by the subconscious).
As evolved creatures, our ethical faculties must also be evolved...what evolutionary problems do the ethical faculties appear to be solving?
- It sure looks like the ethical faculties are primarily designed (evolutionary teleology analogy alert) to solve the problem of social interactions with other members of our species.
- The (main) problem that appears solved by the existence of ethical faculties is the problem of constraining the conscious mind and it's wimpy short-term analysis to behave by proper long-term iterated game theory correct behavior.
- The problem that appears to be solved by our set of 6 distinctive ethical faculties is the problem of handling ingroup (regular, repeated, repuational games) and outgroup (non-reputational one-off games) play differently.
- The problem that appears to be solved by the availability of the ethical faculties to consciousness is the ability to nudge group decisions in our favor, by selective application of vague ethics to specific situations.
What core set of ethics are necessary to creatures like us, regardless our downstream disagreements?
- Long-term non-predating egoist prudence. Much like all insecure political leaders (that is, all political leaders) end up (and should end up) spending their entire energy output maintaining the security of their rule by the logic of public choice...so too should all rational (social, pack, top-predator) animals pursue something that resembles the long-term (cooperative -- tit-for-two-tats) rational self-interest of Aristotle, Buddha, or Rand. Furthermore...the pursuit of this long-term rational self-interest probably has sufficiently many constraints that it consumes MOST of your ethical choices...edging out most of the choices that would have conflicted from the original goal.
- In English, that translates to: Don't be stupid, Do be nice, Be admirable to your group.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to distill the essence of ethics into anything short and pithy like I have for epistemology. Indeed...I'm (subjectively, feeling) certain that the problem is that we have yet to ask the right question.
If I were guessing right now...I'd say that the correct question sounds nothing like modern or historical ethical questions, and instead is a question near "How do I succeed at (extract maximum [total] benefit from) interpersonal interactions, or maybe from my life- (soul?-) span....and the answer is something like:
- Don't be stupid -- and crime/anti-social behavior is almost always stupid
- Usually play tit-for-two tats
- Act to be admired.
The (entire?) difference between the garden-variety Christian, the Buddhist, and the Atheist in this case is in differences in conclusions about the soul-span. Christian thinks that God has rewards and punishments based on acts and faith...therefore their soulspan maximizing prudence is maximized by doing what God commanded. Buddhist thinks that the Karmic cycle rules...and to prudently maximize their soulspan benefit, they need to follow Karmic law. The (sane) Atheist reaches very similar conclusions in daily living...but without formal rules about rosaries, magic underwear, cows, or castes.
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"Don't be stupid -- and crime/anti-social behavior is almost always stupid
Usually play tit-for-two tats
Act to be admired"
Gengis khan was a good person then.
Or a kid in 18th century Taiwan who just got 3 heads in the headhunting raid they just did at the neighbour village.
Spandrell,
I thought I'd said this clearly, in this post especially.
What we know is that the question "What makes a good person" is broken.
You're saying..."But then we get unsatisfactory answers to what makes a good person".
And I'm saying, again...that's because the question is itself broken.
Other examples of broken questions:
"Do green dreams sleep furiously?"
"What color is God?"
We intuit that "What is good?" is (correctly) answerable...that it has a truth-state. Much like "What is true" is assumed answerable. I think we've seen enough to inductively conclude that that intuition is wrong.
Fortunately, we don't live in 18th century Taiwan.
As for Gengis Khan, I've mostly heard this line of argument about Stalin and Mao, and how they died in bed. But we've iterated here, and being an ambitious Communist is bad for your health.
Is there a god? broken
What is true? broken
What makes a good person? broken
Refusing to play doesn't make you win, you know. You can't have a functioning society if you don't answer those questions.
And if we can't answer them, we might as well make an answer up, and follow it through. I believe this is called 'faith' by the religious. I don't think you like that.
I say Gengis because he wasn't admired because of terror and propaganda; he was genuinely popular among his people because he gave them treats. I don't think anyone would agree today in that he was admirable in an objective way, though.
A different question to ask is "Given what I just saw him do, is that person dangerous threat or a valuable ally?" (If you bring up the Mongols, I'll point out that we're dealing at the margin here, and most of the people dealing with them were not at the margin.)
If Alice kills Bob because she wants his wallet, she's dangerous to me. If Alice kills Bob because he wants her wallet, then (in a state of nature etc.) she's not a threat to me, as I'm not going to try to rob her. The capacity to make moral judgements like this provides an obvious evolutionary advantage.
The headhunter's prowess makes him a valuable ally to his fellow villagers, and a dangerous threat to his neighbors. But, because they live in a Malthusian society, he's already a threat to his neighbors merely by existing. Thus we moderns have inherited tribalist urges that serve us poorly in our current wealthy times, like leading the Japanese to make suicidal war with all of their neighbors.
Spandrell,
There is a difference between refusing to play and critiquing the question.
"How should a central planner allocate resources", for instance is a question that can always be answered wrong...However, pointing out that resource allocation doesn't belong in the realm of a central planner...that's pointing out that you chose a bad question. Now...if you're Stalin, I'm sure you can accuse me of "refusing to play"... but it doesn't make your question any better.
The 18th century spent a lot of time trying to find the phlogiston. Bad question.
My claim...when you spend enough time to discover that your question is wrong...the correct answer is to look for a better question, not to make up answers to the broken one.
Alex,
My personal ethics started with Rand's ethical egoism, then added something awful close to the line you are referencing. "How dangerous/valuable is person X to me"
Things like the fact that "Bob is dangerous to Alex" implies that "Bob is dangerous to Aretae" (modulo tribal boundaries etc.) is what I take to be natural law. How people like Feser take natural law to imply that it's wrong to lie to murderers is very strange to me.
Alex,
My favorite identifier is: Bob was evil to his friend Amy...therefore you can't rely on Bob to be good to friends...therefore Bob is not on the friends list.
Similarly...Chuck advocates being mean to outgroup 1...I'm in outgroup 2...therefore Chuck is an enemy.
But you don't have a better question. Not anyone the answer of which is not in-group relativism or individual relativism.
Which are cool, even natural, but they give bad results.
You're getting too close to just saying "good is what society says it is, true is whatever helps achieve that good". The problem being that society tends to say what the power holders in that society want them to say.
So now we're talking politics.
Subjecting philosophy to politics is the quintessential 20 century mindset, and we know where that leads.
BTW have you read Schopenhauer "the two fundamental problems of ethics"? It's a short book, shouldn't take you more than a couple of hours to digest.
Spandrell,
once again...I think I'm saying something MUCH stronger than that.
"Good" is incoherent...much like "green dreams sleep furiously"...or in my opinion "God". Nobody knows even a little bit of what kind of thing they're talking about. Many discussions start with:
I have this intuition that this thing (Good, God, Green Dreams) exists...let's discuss it's nature.
That's just bad thinking.
My shortest version..."Good" as we understand it is, like "certainty" or assessments of "truth", a feature of human minds (specifically of the emotions) and NOT a feature of reality.
Assuming "good" exists "out there", and trying to talk about it is a broken think.
I'll find/read the schopenhauer. Hasn't been at the top of my list so far.
What would you accept as an argument or evidence that I do know what I'm talking about when I say 'good'?
Alrenous,
This is our typical disagreement, one more time.
The problem is not ONE person knowing what they mean when they say "good", "true", etc.
The problem is that the common usage of the word is massively unclear.
You keep trying to say: "I can define a word, and use it consistently".
My answer, this time as always, is that it is fairly easy to demonstrate that the common usage of the word is at best only mildly related to what you are talking about.
Common usage of the word "good" is unclear...and not fixable.
If you wish to define a separate concept "glblsx", and use the same phoneme as the normal person's "good"...that's fine...but I assert that is a WORSE result than recognizing that the concept "good" is both massively unclear, and unjustified.
What would you accept as an argument or evidence that the common usage is reasonably well-related to what I'm talking about?
Alrenous,
I'll accept that without argument. But reasonably well related in the case of ethics is not equivalent to the same.
If you can handle the concerns of the relativists, the intuitionists, the emotivists, the ethical realists, the skeptics, and the "what about Hitler" people...I'd substantially up my probability that you know what you're talking about.
Problem is...there are more than a couple approaches to ethics that are partly good...but leave off big important chunks of what people really (think they) mean when they're talking about ethics.
My claim: the normally understood idea of ethics is incoherent.
For instance: If you want to treat ethics a mind-module that supplies guilt as needed, according with evolved best practices, but with no normative force...that's an awful good evo-psych of ethics, and it's awful predictive, but it misses 90% of what people want to talk about when talking about ethics.
Other: If you want to go all Greek Eudaimonist (or even better, Schmidtz-ian) on me, I think it's a hugely solid ethical structure, rather rock solid...but it misses the fact that ethics arrive as intuitions to people, and get justified 2nd.
Go.
It can't be exactly related, or the common usage would just be exactly correct and there would be no point in studying it.
The problem with the groups you mention is strictly that they think their ethics apply to each other, rather than only themselves. The reason it doesn't occur to them is because they have neglected the meta-ethical justification of their ethics.
It turns out, any justification of e.g. relativist ethics can only justify it for relativists.
Lots of things arrive at people as intuitions. Untrained intuition is often just wrong.
So I agree that minds are a necessary precondition for ethics. (Consciousness, more specifically.) However, this doesn't in any way violate the laws of logic. Which means ethical rules must be consistent.
Untrained ethical intuitions are not special. They're often wrong - inconsistent.
When I threw out the inconsistencies, I found clarity and simplicity. Treat relativists according to relativist ethics. Treat skeptics according to skeptic ethics. Treat violators according to violator ethics - that is, any ethics you happen to feel like.
Though admittedly the downstream consequences get not-simple in a hurry, they get simple again later.
I should do an example. Ethical realist vs. divine-command. Erealist thinks they have no duty to worship, Dcommand think they do.
For Dcommand to force Erealist to worship is to treat Erealist counter to Erealist ethics.
If this is justifiable, then, by symmetry, it must be justifiable for Erealist to treat Dcommand according to Erealist ethics. And I have my contradiction. Dcommand rounds up their worship press-gang, while Erealist promises to shoot Dcommand if they ever set foot in a church again.
Reverse the situation and get stability.
Which means my ethical positions is basically that everyone was right all along...
Alrenous,
A major component of nearly all non-relativist ethics' is their universalism or near- universalism. The claim is that there are things that are RIGHT (contextually, for all folks everywhere), and things that are WRONG (ditto).
Perhaps it would be good to handle an example...I don't believe that abstractions capture anywhere near as much as a few good examples.
In the enlightenment tradition, freedom of expression, and especially freedom to offend is near the center of the learning-centric poly-centric ethics. (This is near-essential to freedom of inquiry)
In the islamic world, mockery of (and images of) the prophet Mohammed is grounds for death. (This is near essential to maintain the sanctity of Islam ... see the condition of religion in the West.)
How does your ethics handle relatively central ethical commandments that explicitly violate one another. It is the duty of Muslims to murder mockeries...and it is the duty of freedomists to mock the mockable.
The meta is universal. The particulars cannot be. Again, that is strictly the problem; Muslims think their morality applies to Westerners, and vice versa.
It is entirely possible for westerners to mock Mohammed without shoving it in the face of Muslims.
Next, consider that Muslims wish to keep their faith. That's the
point of the Mohammed-mock ban.
Inside a Muslim country, the purpose is irrelevant.
So either they can keep their religion by keeping the ban inside their countries, or they have to invade.
If they have to invade, then they're simply wrong. If it's justifiable for them to invade us for their beliefs, (and win) then it must be justifiable for us to invade them (and win). It perverts the idea of justification to state as much.
As a result, [need(invasion)] => [Islam is immoral], and doesn't deserve to survive. Also, is farcically weak and would be hard to keep alive even if you wanted to.
Similarly, going to X-istan and mocking Mohammed is essentially a non-military invasion and just as much a perversion of justification.
1. So...your solution is effectively to sign onto the cultural relativist point of view...and claim that universalist ethics are just hokum. Even though every ethical system since the dawn of time claims universalism as an important, central part of their ethics?
2. You've left yourself open to a standard cultural relativist critique: The "what about hitler" objection... or at least the "what about african clitorectomies?" All good according to you?
What about Hitler? Up the magnification, and take justification down to the level of the individual.
If Hitler can justify killing Jews then I can justify killing Hitler. Hitler thinking Jews=Bad implies that Hitler=Bad. His only choice was to believe contradictory things without realizing it.
Everyone, universally, gets to decide the particulars of ethics for themselves, defining what is correct treatment of them. Subject only to logical consistency, which implies all rights are negative.
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