I must repeat:

… the subject under discussion is still the phenomenon of human morality; I am seeking only to examine how it works, and why it works the way it does.

I am not denying that moral propositions have any content; they can still have a content in the same way that propositions about baseball do: by convention. We know we are talking about morality and not baseball because we are not uttering advice about whether to bunt or swing away; we are using all the ordinary-language terms we have always used to talk about morality, and anyone listening would have opinions of their own that they would regard as opinions about morality. The only distinction I am making is that our feeling that moral truths have an ontological reality beyond human opinions of them may be mistaken. I may say that one should try to steal with a man on first and one out when you are more than three runs down; you may say otherwise. There may be no ontological fact of the matter, but we are still plainly talking about baseball, and not morality, and the proposition is still contentful.

But I will prepare a more thorough response shortly. Thanks as always for sticking with this; it’s a fascinating journey, even if the destination is still far off in the mist.

Take your time. I know how difficult it is to reconcile all things pressing.

Now, perhaps you should reflect upon these comments before you respond extensively.

You claim that “my only claim is that on a naturalistic account, our customary beliefs about morality may not have the objective truth-values we wish them to. But the subject under discussion is still the phenomenon of human morality;”

But you also claim that our moral intuitions are irrelevant to assess your account and also that moral propositions do not have a content. When these things are put together with your denial that moral propositions have a truth-value, then it is simply unclear how we determine whether that which you talk about is still what we recognize as moral propositions.
Here is how to think about this. Suppose someone claims that moral propositions are about the configurations of the stars. Well, such a claim can be assessed because (i) They maintain that moral propositions have a content and a truth-value; and (ii) They do not deny that moral intuitions are relevant in assessing this theory.
For instance, according to such a view the truth conditions of a propositions such as “Murder is wrong” will be equivalent to a proposition about some star configuration; call this proposition P. Thus, we are going to have

(1) ‘Murder is wrong’ is true if and only if P

We now can recall our moral intuition to determine whether (1) is true and of course we will quickly conclude that it is not, and so on.

On your account, however, we have no way of determining such things. We cannot formulate equivalences such as (1) because according to you a proposition such as ‘Murder is wrong’ has no truth-value; hence, the analog of the right side of (1) will not be well formed at all. Moreover, since moral intuitions are irrelevant, we cannot assess a claim such as the one you made about the morality of cannibalism and group fitness any more than a claim to the effect that cannibalism would have been considered right if and only if it would have been practiced for the purpose of entertainment, for instance.
How can we assess such competing account if we cannot rely upon our moral intuitions?
And how do we know that we still are talking about morality rather than baseball or the weather? Since after all, the terms ‘ought’, ‘right’, and their cognates do not have a meaning; the sentences in which they occur do not have truth conditions; and our moral intuitions expressed by their use are irrelevant to any account of what we call ‘morality’.

This is the challenge I have posed to you. And you cannot dismiss it by simply claiming that you are still talking about the subject matter of morality, because you have removed every distinguishing mark of this subject matter. How do you know that you are talking about morality when you claim lets say that human sacrifice would have been morally permissible if it would have been contributing to group fitness? Your response that it would have been permissible from the point of view of those who engaged in human sacrifice is not to the point. The question before us is a counter-factual situation. If human sacrifice would have been contributing to group fitness, would it then be morally permissible? This question is not about what those who participated in such activities think: of course, they either thought it was permissible or did not care. If we say that human sacrifice would have been immoral even if it contributes to group fitness, then those who think otherwise are wrong, no matter when, who, and where.

peter

You are right to examine what other possible foundations we might have for morality, e.g. theism and utilitarianism; indeed on a naturalistic view one might add another candidate, namely that the sort of moral system we have arrived at is an optimal solution for well-functioning social groups (which seems to be rather on a par with utilitarianism, I think).

I will have to respond as time permits; work presses on me heavily at the moment, and tomorrow I will be traveling for most of the day. If I can make a preliminary response tonight I will.

A. Let me sum up your position as it stands now.

(1) You maintain that moral propositions, statements, judgments do not have a truth-value because there is no objective realm of facts to which they could correspond.
(2) You maintain that moral intuitions are to be discarded in the context of this discussion whenever they conflict with your naturalistic account.
(3) There are no moral disagreements; there are only differences in taste.
(4) What we construe as moral propositions, statements, and judgments are in fact nothing but, and emerge from, adaptive dispositions.

B. I will now raise some objections about your meta-ethical views expressed in (1)-(4):

Claim: You have changed the subject and no longer engage in a discussion about morality. It is not even clear what subject matter you are addressing. Here are some of the considerations which support this claim:
(a) In order for a theory to be assessed as an adequate or inadequate account of a given subject matter it must first be deemed as a theory about the subject matter in question. So before we can judge whether your meta-ethical account is adequate or not we must first determine whether it is indeed a theory about the subject matter of “morality”. Well, is it?

Let us see:
(a1) You argue that moral-propositions do not have a truth value because there is no objective domain to which they correspond. Therefore, according to your meta-ethical theory there is no distinctive subject matter of morality at all.
(a2) You argue that moral-intuition cannot serve as evidence in favor of one or another meta-ethical theory. Hence, one important source of evidence specific to this subject matter is totally irrelevant. But you offer no alternative theory of evidence that can adjudicate between different accounts of this subject matter.
(a3) You argue that despite all appearances to the contrary what is viewed as moral disagreements are nothing but differences in matters of taste. By construing moral disagreements as matters of taste you in fact deny that moral attitudes, such as beliefs about moral matters, have a cognitive content (or meaning) at all. In other words, what we normally view as conflicting moral beliefs with contradictory content (matters that belong to the cognitive domain), you construe as completely different phenomena; these are not beliefs at all, they are instead preferences based on non-rational dispositions such as taste, etc.
(b) Thus, your meta-ethical theory has no subject matter of its own. The source of evidence in favor or against a given theory cannot be moral in character; so moral theories have no evidence of their own. And, finally, propositions that appear to have a distinctively moral content in fact lack any content whatsoever.
(c) Therefore, your so-called “meta-ethical” theory is not about the subject matter of morality or ethics at all. If we were to simply look at the theory from the inside, as it were, we could not tell that it is about anything having to do with morality. The only reason that your theory has anything to do with morality at all is because you make certain statements about it; namely, that it is an account of what we normally label by the term ‘morality’. But, in the absence of a domain, evidence, and content recognizable as distinctly about morality, such a claim-from-the-outside has absolutely no force. Thus, you have changed the subject and no longer engage in a discussion about morality.

C. Let me now address your arguments on behalf of claim (1) in A above. You maintain that moral propositions, statements and judgments do not feature a truth value because you cannot see what would constitute an objective realm of facts to which they correspond and which will determine an objective truth-value for such propositions.
Claim 1: Your argument fails to consider several options that do offer an objective realm to which moral propositions can correspond and which can determine an objective truth-value for them.

(a) There are at least three different moral theories that offer an objective model that renders moral propositions true or false:
(a1) Theism: Moral propositions are objectively true by virtue of corresponding to the explicit mandates of Go or to the logical consequences of these; if they conflict with such mandates or their logical consequences, then they are objectively false.
(a2) Utilitarianism: Moral propositions are objectively true if they follow from the correct principle of utility; otherwise they are false.
(a3) Deontological (Kantian) Theories: Moral propositions are objectively true if they follow from a version of Kant’s Categorical Imperative; if they conflict with anything that follows from the Categorical Imperative, then they are false.

(b) (a1)-(a3) are certain meta-ethical theories that offer an objective basis for morality. They construe moral propositions as having a truth-value; as having cognitive content; and as having an evidential basis we can rely upon to adjudicate among alternative moral theories. So all three meta-ethical theories are clearly about the domain we normally identify as morality.
(c) Each of these meta-ethical theories may be vulnerable to certain objections. But all of them are immune to the objection I have raised about your meta-ethical theory; namely, that your account changed the subject matter of our conversation to such a degree that we no longer recognize in it a theory about what we normally identify as the subject matter of morality. So whether these meta-ethical theories are correct or not, we at least can evaluate their adequacy because we know that they are about the subject matter of morality.

Claim 2: You do not see that there can be an objective domain for moral discourse because you have a very narrow conception of what constitutes a legitimate domain for any discourse. But your narrow standard of what constitute a legitimate objective domain would exclude fields that we all consider to be legitimate subject matters of inquiry.
(a) Abstract Sciences: Mathematics (as well as geometry) is considered abstract because its subject matter requires us to posit a domain of objects that are not in space and time (I am now expounding the classical view, which is the most common among mathematicians; there are alternatives such as intuitionism and constructivism (a version of formalism in mathematics)).
(a1) Mathematical propositions thus have a cognitive meaning because they are about a domain of objects, namely, mathematical structures which include entities such as numbers, sets of numbers, properties of numbers, etc.
(a2) The evidence in mathematics appeals to proofs and to mathematical intuitions about the relationship between proofs and the truth of mathematical propositions.
(a3) There are genuine disagreements about mathematical propositions and there is a fact of the matter which side is correct.

(b) Moral discourse, like mathematical discourse, may feature a very similar structure. Its domain may be an abstract moral structure consisting of moral properties and their relationship to certain types of actions. It is this relationship that determines the truth or falsity of moral propositions. We can glean these relationships by relying upon our moral intuitions and we can appeal to a variety of sources to gather evidence on behalf of one or another moral view. Moral intuitions play a role in both discovering new moral truths as well as by evaluating moral theories with respect to their claims. For instance, if a moral theory claims that lying is wrong without exceptions, then we can evaluate this claim by devising circumstances in which our moral intuitions judge that lying, under such circumstances, is either permissible or morally obligatory.

(c) Moral discourse appears to have a logical structure of its own which suggests it does feature a cognitive content. For instance, we can define moral obligation in terms of negation and the moral notion of permissibility; we can define moral prohibition in terms of negation and permissibility or in terms of negation and the notion of obligation, etc. Hence, we are able to set up rules of inference that are specific to moral discourse just like in non-moral discourse, or modal discourse, or mathematical discourse.

Conclusion: The logical, evidential, and other factors stated above suggest that moral discourse features a logical structure and therefore cognitive meaning; that there is a certain kind of evidence that is relevant to moral discourse; that we can devise a model of a subject matter for such discourse. We may even construct a model whereby the relevant portions of human history offer a certain kind of evidence on behalf of certain meta-ethical and moral theories.
By contrast, your account takes the conversation outside the realm of morality altogether and offers us no reason to think that it has anything to do with morality as such.
peter

What I meant in the remark cited in 1) above was that if cannibalism had been an important part of our own group fitness (or whatever evolutionary/historical antecedents lead to the formation of moral intuitions), then we would see nothing immoral about it, as I assume the cannibals don’t. This is almost a tautological consequence of the position I’m defending, so I admit it doesn’t add much to the discussion. I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer.

Ad 2), I agree that we react differently to differences of taste than to differences of moral outlook. One we don’t care much about, and the other we care very much about indeed. I would argue that the latter are imbued with far deeper significance because they are essential for the cohesion of groups.

I am of course well aware of the implications of this view as regards your penultimate paragraph, and indeed on this view what you say is quite right: in purely rational terms we would have to admit that our own moral system can make no deeper claim to truth than an outsider’s. This of course could expose our own group to all manner of corrosive influences, undermining the cohesive value of a particular moral system for the group that relies on it, and indeed, this is a good adaptive argument for why we naturally imagine our moral intuitions to be far more deeply rooted in ontological reality than they really are. It protects them — and by extension, it protects the stability of the group that is bound together by them. I think the same is true for religion.

Again, none of this means that there is any reason why we have to reject our own moral systems (insofar as we even can), any more than we have to stop liking the foods we do, or enjoying sex. To the people you describe who want us to become cannibals, there’s no reason we can’t simply sic the dogs on them.

I quite agree that this view may not be “ready for prime time”; it seems to be the Dread Secret of naturalism. I realize also that even espousing such a view might quite naturally cause one to become rather unwelcome.

I am not sure you appreciate the force of the points I have made in my last post. So let me try again:

1)You say: “I do think that were cannibalism, for example, strongly conducive to group fitness, we would see nothing immoral about it, and in fact there have been cultures where this is so.”

It is of course a historical fact that such cultures existed. And let us suppose we should find out that cannibalism was “conducive to group fitness”. I would find it hard to believe that *we* would see “nothing immoral about it”. I wonder where do you get the evidence to render such a conclusion?

2) Referring to theories that promote cannibalism, human sacrifice, etc,. you say:
“I agree that we can’t reject such a theory as being objectively false. But this does not mean that we cannot, in practical terms, reject it anyway, because it is morally distasteful to us (after all, who is to say that we can’t?).”
But what exactly do you mean by “morally distasteful”? If it is like the chocolate/vanilla ice-cream case, then our moral-distaste of such theories does not have the character that the rejection of such theories demands. For example, rejecting such theories does not imply merely a personal reference. It has the force to the effect that any rational moral agent must reject such theories if they are to maintain their moral agency.
There is overwhelming evidence against the view that our rejection of such theories is merely a matter of taste. It is not merely a matter of viewing them with a distaste like for instance someone who eats in public with their hands, etc. It is a matter of the manner we conceive of ourselves and of humanity.

And what will you say to a group of people who promote the view that our taste in matters of human sacrifice needs to be changed, just like our taste in food ought to be. And so they begin promoting such practices and gradually gain ground. According to your “morally distasteful” theory, those who promote such a theory are in just as good a standing as those who wish to change our taste in food in order to promote their food preferences (e.g., promote the liking of Chinese food). And just like in the later case, one has no reason to resist them because, who knows, perhaps my tastes about human-sacrifice might indeed change; how do I know it won’t?

There is much more to be said, but for now this should suffice. Of course, we will have to explore the ramifications of your view on (b) above: how such views impact the manner we organize society.

peter

On the other hand, in the physical sciences there are perhaps different sorts of ways of settling empirical questions.

I do think that were cannibalism, for example, strongly conducive to group fitness, we would see nothing immoral about it, and in fact there have been cultures where this is so.

A theory that promotes cannibalism, human sacrifice, slavery, racism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape, torture, murder, etc., cannot be rejected when compared to a theory that rejects all such practices as immoral on the grounds that the former is false or flies in the face of evidence based upon our moral intuitions.

Well, I agree that we can’t reject such a theory as being objectively false. But this does not mean that we cannot, in practical terms, reject it anyway, because it is morally distasteful to us (after all, who is to say that we can’t?). And that, I argue, is what we in fact do, but to build our confidence we also like to dress our consciences up in the “emperor’s clothes” of objective moral truth.

Simply looking at the often-contradictory variety of moral systems that men have embraced throughout history, one would have to imagine that one cannot assume objective moral truth simply on the basis of strong moral intuitions. There do seem to be some universals, but the breadth of their variation mitigates against, I think, the notion that there is some underlying truth or falsehood to any of it.

Of course, one can just say that everyone else has got it all wrong. But if two communities disagree about some moral “fact”, to what absolute reference can they appeal to settle the question?

I must admit I’m an easy sell for arguments against reductionism, and so perhaps am insufficiently critical. But insofar as I’ve been able to follow them, his discussions of complex molecular systems, and his discussion of the impact of complexity on the dynamics of systems, have seemed to my untrained eye very careful and at least somewhat convincing. I don’t quite get why he places so much significance on the “multiple platforms” argument, but I do think he makes a convincing case that reductionist explanations must “explain forward”, not just trace causal chains after the fact, to prove the reductionist argument. Simply saying in effect “Since I can trace this back to that, I could in principle explain everything in terms of that” has always seemed to me to be nothing more than hand-waving, asking the rest of us to take way too much on faith.

Since I’m only halfway through the book, I’m not sure he’s going to pull off his case that he’s “reinventing the sacred”, but still–wouldn’t it be a hoot if it turned out that something human beings recognized as having enough properties of God to merit the name turned out to be a natural emergent property of the Universe, and not supernatural at all? That would flummox people on both sides of the dreat divide :-)

You write:

“Indeed it has been my purpose from the beginning (as I have written in previous posts, here and here) to deny that moral statements have an objective truth-value. I think this is the inevitable end-point of the naturalist position — a nettle that evolutionary theorists have been reluctant to grasp, in public at least, for reasons that are, perhaps, understandable.”

Wonderful! So now we have a clear philosophical position that we all can chew on. I shall consider this position (which you explicitly stated in previous posts) as one of the fundamental or defining theses of your naturalism.
A thorough discussion of this position will have to explore the consequences of denying objective truth-values to *all* moral propositions (how do you Bold on this site?) without exception. It is imperative to remember that the present position–the truth-valueless view–has a variety of implications.
One of the most important ones is moral-reasoning. If no moral propositions have truth values, then it is doubtful that the rules of reason apply. For instance, why should one refrain from holding a moral proposition and its negation (i.e., a contradiction)? After all, if neither proposition has a truth-value, then their conjunction fails to have a truth-value also. Consequently, the principal reason to refrain from holding contradictory beliefs: i.e., that their conjunction must be false, no longer applies to the sphere of moral propositions.

As for my question (a) you say that we can in fact maintain the position that moral propositions have no truth-value despite overwhelming intuitions to the contrary because “we accept other counterintuitive results that our exploration of the world has placed before us;”.
Indeed, we do.
And so another task is to compare this case with the other areas where research has overturned prevailing intuitions. Such a comparison will reveal, I believe, that there is a fundamental difference between the cases.

It is one thing to overturn astronomical belief such as that the earth is flat or that it is in the center of the universe or that position and velocity are absolute and universal properties of objects. It is quite another to maintain that our intuitive conception of a whole subject matter that is deeply entrenched in human history turns out to be so fundamentally misguided. For the later claim entails not merely that this or that moral theory is false; it maintains that the parameters of true/false do not apply to any moral theory at all. So your claim here is a meta-ethical position and a radical one at that.
It would be like the assertion that no theory about the origin of the species has a truth-value. Since such a claim would render all standard forms of reasoning and evidential considerations about the subject matter irrelevant, preferences among theories of life cannot be guided by such considerations. Imagine the consequences!

The same holds in the case of morality. Preference among competing theories of morality cannot be guided by our moral intuitions, reasoning, or evidential considerations. A theory that promotes cannibalism, human sacrifice, slavery, racism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape, torture, murder, etc., cannot be rejected when compared to a theory that rejects all such practices as immoral on the grounds that the former is false or flies in the face of evidence based upon our moral intuitions.
You of course might argue that a theory that promotes practices such as cannibalism, etc., is not conducive to adaptability and survival. But, how do you know that? What evidence do you have that a moral theory that promotes human sacrifice, for instance, is less prone to the adaptability of the human species and its survival than a theory which rejects it? The actual history of humanity which rejected human sacrifice cannot be used here as evidence, because the rejection of these practices was based in the end on moral grounds: people gradually came to believe that the practice of human sacrifice is immoral. You are not entitled to appeal to history here because you thereby appeal to considerations which your meta-ethical theory rejects.

So here is some of the baggage you will have to carry and justify carrying.

We shall see where this leads.
peter

Thanks – I’ve long had an interest in Santa-Fe style notions of self-organizing complexity, and I’d have no problem with such an account of many features of living things. In particular, the idea that meaning is an emergent property of complex living systems is pretty much what I’ve been arguing for here.

The interesting question is what sort of foundation this gives for the content of meaning — a distinction that must be kept in mind when we talk about whether normativity is “real” (and by the way, I have not been arguing that it isn’t).

Here’s a quote from the book:

“What about all the aspects of the universe we hold sacred–agency, meaning, values, purpose, all life, and the planet? We are neither ready to give these up nor willing to consider them mere human illusions. One response is that if the natural world has no room for these things, and yet we are unshakably convinced of their reality, they thye must be outside of nature–supernatural, infused into the universe by God. The schism between religion and science is, therefore, in part, as disagreement over the existence of meaning. If meaning were to be discovered scientifically, the schism might be healed.”

The author of the book has expertise in mollecular biology and complexity theory. He mounts a full-frontal assault on reductionism, and is attempting to demonstrate through science and math that meaning is an emergent property of complex living systems. I suspect there’s plenty of meat in his arguments to either irritate or tickle the fancy, or both, of all three of you.

Title: Reinventing the Sacred: A new view of science, reason, and religion

Author: Stuart A. Kauffman

It may be a few days before I manage to put together a new post to get the ball rolling — it’s a very busy week, with cross-country travel coming up as well.

Can’t a nihilist still carry an umbrella for the reason that he doesn’t want to get wet?

It’s true that so far as public behavior is concerned, nihilists can act in ways that are indistinguishable from moral realists, even the saintly ones. But there’s a difference that matters a lot to some of us. The nihilist cannot adduce reasons for his actions, since he can have no such reasons.