Steven Novella's article Objective vs Subjective Morality

[Tammuz]

Over a decade ago, Steven Novella wrote a blogpost about the nature of morality, Objective vs Subjective Morality. It is not a long read.

It doesn't really use a lot of philosophical lingo, presumably for the sake of being accessible.

As an article about the nature of morality, really meta-ethics, how do you think it fares? Is it sound? Are there any flaws in it? If so, what are these?

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

Over a decade ago, Steven Novella wrote a blogpost about the nature of morality, Objective vs Subjective Morality. It is not a long read.

It doesn't really use a lot of philosophical lingo, presumably for the sake of being accessible.

As an article about the nature of morality, really meta-ethics, how do you think it fares? Is it sound? Are there any flaws in it? If so, what are these?

He is (close enough to being) correct when he says: "objective or subjective. This, I maintain, is a false dichotomy."

 

[steve_bank]

Any absolute morality has to have an absolve reference or authority.

To me morality in whatever the current social consensus says it is.

A good example is gay rights. It slowly over decades went from small support to a majority support.

Hetero oral sex was once illegal.

There can be a difference between what I may think is morality and what the majority morality is.

The most basic question is what is our fundamental inbred nature. orality becomes an attempt to tempere our natural instincts.

Ancient tribal moniogamyy reduces conliclt.

 

[Bronzeage]

I don't know why this gets so complicated. Every human society since there have been human societies has two moral precepts. First, do not kill your friends, second, do not steal your friends stuff. Everything after that is defining friend and stuff.

We are a social animal. We have to be social to survive, starting with being a helpless infant and ending with a decrepit old age. These two simple rules have allowed homo sapiens society to expand to a point where it's become possible be quite antisocial and not starve to death or be eaten by a leopard.

The two rules aren't rules in the usual sense, they are actually two expectations. It defines what friends expect of us. Anyone at any time can kill their friend and take all his stuff, but it means one will lose the expectation of not being killed and losing all your stuff. This is what allows us to assemble a group of people of differing ages and abilities, large enough that all the general needs to stay alive can be met. Somebody hunts and somebody else cooks. The harsher the environment, the more critical cooperation and division of labor becomes. When it gets cold, we need more food and it's harder to find, so someone has to spend more time hunting and someone has to cook and make clothes. None of this is possible if we have to worry about being murdered in our sleep.

Successful social groups get larger, which brings on more problems with the definitions of friend and stuff. The definitions get complicated by different classes of friend. Some social groups think it's fine to grab someone from another group and make them become stuff. They aren't a friend, so taking their stuff is cool. Killing their friends in the process is also not a problem, at least by the definitions in use.

When a group gets large enough, a problem arises of what to do with someone who violates one or both of the rules. There is a point at which public shaming is no longer sufficient. Imagine if every single person who knew you by name and sight, thought you were a horrible person and didn't want to have anything to do with you. That's a pretty good inhibition of antisocial behavior, but if there's a couple thousand people in the group who don't know you, or what you did, you can just go someplace else.

Now the definitions have to include not only the expectations of proper behavior in the group, but also what the group will do to the person who breaks the rules. Someone has to be given the job of actually doing what is done to rule breakers. This creates a stratification of social power and suddenly, we've invented hierarchy. The top of the hierarchy finds themselves in a position to manipulate and define the definitions and we find ourselves in our present situation.

 

[Bomb#20]

Over a decade ago, Steven Novella wrote a blogpost about the nature of morality, Objective vs Subjective Morality. It is not a long read.

It doesn't really use a lot of philosophical lingo, presumably for the sake of being accessible.

As an article about the nature of morality, really meta-ethics, how do you think it fares? Is it sound? Are there any flaws in it? If so, what are these?

Looks pretty wrong-headed overall.

First, let’s define “morality” and discuss why it is needed. Morality is a code of behavior that aspires to some goal that is perceived as good.

That would seem to imply the end justifies the means.

We can take as empirical facts, however, that humans have feelings and our actions affect others – these are therefore well-founded premises for a moral system. Philosophers have tried to derive from there further premises as a starting point for a moral system. The goal is to derive the most fundamental principles, or determine the most reasonable first principles, and then proceed carefully from there.

That turns logic on its head. If the further premises are derived then they aren't a starting point. Nothing derived is fundamental or a first principle. It's an Nth principle.

Because we are talking about values, a moral principle can never be a completely empirical fact, and therefore cannot be completely determined by scientific investigation.

That's begging the question. The framing of morality as being about values is a subjectivist premise. If morality is objective then a moral claim can be true whether anyone values it or not. Kant said morality isn't about how we can make ourselves happy but rather how we can make ourselves deserve to be happy.

That science can determine morals is the position of Sam Harris and others, which I have rejected in a previous post ...

This, I maintain, is a false dichotomy. They are complex, with some subjective aspects (the values) and some objective aspects (explorations of their universality and implications).

Further, this is the best that human can do. What is the other option?

Well, there are those who maintain that the other option is an objective source of morality. In my personal experience, everyone that has made taken this position with me used their religious faith in God as their “objective” source of morality – a “lawgiver.”

That's an autobiography, not an argument. Sam Harris is an atheist. Kind of famous for it. So evidently not everyone that has taken this position used their religious faith in God as their “objective” source of morality.

There are also those who (probably unintentionally) argue that the laws of nature dictate a certain morality. This is the “it’s not natural” argument, which in my opinion is nothing but the naturalistic fallacy.

That's not the naturalistic fallacy.

This line of argument has mostly been rejected by philosophers as an is/ought confusion. Just because nature is a certain way, that does not mean it is a basis for human morality. Even human nature does not dictate morality

The is-ought problem is overrated. Hume infamously used pretty much the same line of argument to identify an analogous is-will problem. It supposedly undermines the logical foundation of all of science.

Is it even possible to have an objective morality? I would argue that it is not possible, and even if such existed it would be irrelevant because we could not know about it.

Proof by blatant assertion.

The notion of an objective morality assumes that morality is something that can make sense apart from the context in which it is used (in our case, human society). Is it objectively wrong, according to some moral law of the universe, to harm another creature?

That's a failure of imagination. Objective doesn't imply noncontextual. If there are objective moral facts, that doesn't mean they have to look like the first thing an antirealist proposes as an example -- it's up to realists to say what they postulate, not up to antirealists to say what their opponents postulate. If there are moral facts, they probably look a lot more like "It was wrong for ICE agent Christian Castro to shoot Julio Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis last January." than "It's wrong to harm another creature.".

The point is, even if there were, humans have no way to know about it in any verifiable way that can be universalized. This necessarily leads us to tribal warring over whose beliefs are correct?

In the first place, that's an Appeal to Consequences fallacy. In the second place, societies ruled by moral antirealists have been no slouches at tribal warring. And in the third place, this seems to be appealing to the premise that tribal warring over whose beliefs are correct is bad. Should we damn Yankees have refrained from making war on the slavers in the Confederacy and left them to enslave their neighbors in peace, because we had no way to know slavery was bad?

 

[Bomb#20]

I don't know why this gets so complicated. Every human society since there have been human societies has two moral precepts. First, do not kill your friends, second, do not steal your friends stuff. Everything after that is defining friend and stuff.

In 1822 Charles Wilsden became the first known person to be convicted of cruelty to an animal, for "barbarous conduct" to his reportedly obstinate donkey, shortly after an "Act to prevent the cruel and improper treatment of Cattle" was signed into law by George IV, and he was ordered to pay a fine.

It seems hard to square this with a moral theory of the sort you're proposing. I can see three possible ways one might try to reconcile them:

1. Parliament and the King legislated wrongly. Barbarously beating your donkey isn't immoral.
2. The donkey was Wilsden's friend.
3. The donkey was actually Wilsden's friends' stuff, not Wilsden's stuff.

But explanations 2 and 3 founder on the observation that while barbarously beating his donkey for being obstinate was considered immoral, Wilsden would have been considered perfectly within his rights to kill her.

 

[Bronzeage]

I don't know why this gets so complicated. Every human society since there have been human societies has two moral precepts. First, do not kill your friends, second, do not steal your friends stuff. Everything after that is defining friend and stuff.

In 1822 Charles Wilsden became the first known person to be convicted of cruelty to an animal, for "barbarous conduct" to his reportedly obstinate donkey, shortly after an "Act to prevent the cruel and improper treatment of Cattle" was signed into law by George IV, and he was ordered to pay a fine.

It seems hard to square this with a moral theory of the sort you're proposing. I can see three possible ways one might try to reconcile them:

1. Parliament and the King legislated wrongly. Barbarously beating your donkey isn't immoral.
2. The donkey was Wilsden's friend.
3. The donkey was actually Wilsden's friends' stuff, not Wilsden's stuff.

But explanations 2 and 3 founder on the observation that while barbarously beating his donkey for being obstinate was considered immoral, Wilsden would have been considered perfectly within his rights to kill her.

It's not a theory. It's an empirical observation.
As I said before, everything after that is arguing over definitions. We are free to define who is in our group, and there's nothing to prevent us from extending the protection of group membership to an animal.

 

[Bomb#20]

I don't know why this gets so complicated. Every human society since there have been human societies has two moral precepts. First, do not kill your friends, second, do not steal your friends stuff. Everything after that is defining friend and stuff.

In 1822 Charles Wilsden became the first known person to be convicted of cruelty to an animal, for "barbarous conduct" to his reportedly obstinate donkey, shortly after an "Act to prevent the cruel and improper treatment of Cattle" was signed into law by George IV, and he was ordered to pay a fine.

It seems hard to square this with a moral theory of the sort you're proposing. I can see three possible ways one might try to reconcile them:

1. Parliament and the King legislated wrongly. Barbarously beating your donkey isn't immoral.
2. The donkey was Wilsden's friend.
3. The donkey was actually Wilsden's friends' stuff, not Wilsden's stuff.

But explanations 2 and 3 founder on the observation that while barbarously beating his donkey for being obstinate was considered immoral, Wilsden would have been considered perfectly within his rights to kill her.

It's not a theory. It's an empirical observation.
As I said before, everything after that is arguing over definitions. We are free to define who is in our group, and there's nothing to prevent us from extending the protection of group membership to an animal.

Yes, I listed that -- it's option 2. But if that were why a livestock owner can't beat his animal, then the protection of group membership having been extended to the animal would also imply he can't kill the animal.

Point being, this gets so complicated because your empirical observation only fits a subset of what's observable. There are out-of-the way corners of the moral observation space where something besides your two precepts must be going on, much as Ptolemaic cosmology was an empirical observation but it couldn't account for Jupiter having its own moons. Cruelty-to-animals prohibition was the first counterexample that came to mind but there are others, such as prohibition of incest.

 

[Bronzeage]

I don't know why this gets so complicated. Every human society since there have been human societies has two moral precepts. First, do not kill your friends, second, do not steal your friends stuff. Everything after that is defining friend and stuff.

In 1822 Charles Wilsden became the first known person to be convicted of cruelty to an animal, for "barbarous conduct" to his reportedly obstinate donkey, shortly after an "Act to prevent the cruel and improper treatment of Cattle" was signed into law by George IV, and he was ordered to pay a fine.

It seems hard to square this with a moral theory of the sort you're proposing. I can see three possible ways one might try to reconcile them:

1. Parliament and the King legislated wrongly. Barbarously beating your donkey isn't immoral.
2. The donkey was Wilsden's friend.
3. The donkey was actually Wilsden's friends' stuff, not Wilsden's stuff.

But explanations 2 and 3 founder on the observation that while barbarously beating his donkey for being obstinate was considered immoral, Wilsden would have been considered perfectly within his rights to kill her.

It's not a theory. It's an empirical observation.
As I said before, everything after that is arguing over definitions. We are free to define who is in our group, and there's nothing to prevent us from extending the protection of group membership to an animal.

Yes, I listed that -- it's option 2. But if that were why a livestock owner can't beat his animal, then the protection of group membership having been extended to the animal would also imply he can't kill the animal.

Point being, this gets so complicated because your empirical observation only fits a subset of what's observable. There are out-of-the way corners of the moral observation space where something besides your two precepts must be going on, much as Ptolemaic cosmology was an empirical observation but it couldn't account for Jupiter having its own moons. Cruelty-to-animals prohibition was the first counterexample that came to mind but there are others, such as prohibition of incest.

I will agree that empirical observations only apply to things that can be observed. I you can point out a human society where it is proper behavior to kill or steal from persons within the group, I will happily amend the observation.

Perhaps the incest taboo is a third precept. It certainly exists to keep group cohesion, as it prevents the big strong guy from keeping every female in his harem. This inhibition seems to be so powerful, it's a very rare issue compared to murder and theft.