A genealogical account of *why* all those noncognitivists have made so many concessions to the moral-realist position would be very interesting, but I guess that's more a project of intellectual history than it is one of philosophy, I suppose.
How about the Gibbard-style expressivist view? (My preferred non-cognitivist view). This view explains why we can usually consistently (and usefully!) act as if moral statements have truth values: The semantics of moral statements just happens to be formally very similar to the semantics of propositions. (Moral statements are modeled with sets of "hyperplans" while propositions are modeled with sets of possible worlds). I think of this as being similar to the case of 'caloric' in the scientific analysis of heat (it turns out the dynamical equations that model fluids can also be used to model heat, so the hypothesis that there was some fluid 'caloric' that flowed between bodies seemed to make sense). To me, the expressivist, modeling moral statements as truth-apt is like modeling heat as a fluid. It yields good predictions, sure, but there's a much deeper explanation of *why* it yields good predictions. So it's kind of an error theory for cognitivism, in that it gives an explanation as to why the cognitivist position can be so attractive, despite being false. I also like the expressivist view for the practical role it identifies for morality: it's about planning, it's about figuring out which things to do and endorsing or rejecting plans for what to do. I think this speaks to your concern about the pragmatic role of moral statements. (How attractive you find this feature may depend on how you want to treat distinctions between semantics and pragmatics) Although I can imagine some variant of the Gibbard-style expressivism as being compatible with some cognitivism, where we adopt a kind of two-dimensional semantics for statements (moral and non-moral alike). If we're error theorists we can say that all the moral statements are false despite having some non-trivial content on the hyperplan side of things. If we're some species of moral realists, I suppose we can say some moral statements are true. But in this case, I'm not really sure what role "truth" or "falsity" is supposed to serve, since it seems we can model moral discourse perfectly well without it. also the haircut is really flattering!
You should also explain why you changed your hair (just kidding). I went through the same transition from noncognitivism to error theory several years ago after reading Richard Joyce's book Myth of Morality. Nowadays, I tend to blend noncognitivism with error theory, just because one metaethical theory doesn't seem to be able to exhaust all the possible folk reasons why people make moral judgements. Some moral judgements are based on almost pure emotion, while others are more rationalistic, while still others are, well, religious. I see moral judgements as being a psychological reaction most of the time, rather than philosophical. Regardless, it seems to me the moral reaction comes first, then the post-hoc explanation---sometimes expressed as a truth-apt objective rational principle, and sometimes expressed in emotive terms (e.g. disgust).
19:30 our cognitive beliefs can change our emotions. Just a generation ago, a lot of people were as homophobic as you say, but changing cognitive beliefs altered that. It's not automatic but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Finding out that something you emotionally think is bad, "isn't actually bad in some objective sense" (not to say objective morals exist, i mean that objective arguments that the thing isn't harmful or that it's incoherent with our other beliefs get brought up) is an experience a lot of people go through over the course of their life and many of them manage to change their feelings to adapt to that. If we found out something we currently feel & think is good was actually bad, the rational thing to do would be to try (even if it were hard) to change our emotions, just as it is for those other people. If "I don't care about the facts then" is the correct response when your emotional judgement conflicts with "objective morality," why do we get mad at people who were raised racist or homophobic who don't change when they're shown that those things are bad, and why do so many people raised that way change their emotions to fit the facts? You seem rational so I doubt you really would refuse to change your emotions if convincing proof that something you currently feel is good were actually bad got provided (hell you're old enough that you've probably already gone through that process yourself!). 23:00 when people get those sorts of extreme beliefs like the external world doesn't exist, it does seem to change their behavior a lot (then again such people tend to be mentally ill) so I don't think your intuition that it wouldn't alter behavior is correct. Humans aren't the "belief in, emotion/action out" machines some think us to be, but beliefs still have a big impact on how we act - if you were convinced everyone else was a "zombie" then you'd presumably have less qualms about hurting them for your own benefit, if you were convinced the world wasn't real it'd presumably make you less afraid of jumping off cliffs, etc.
"why do we get mad at people who were raised racist or homophobic who don't change when they're shown that those things are bad, and why do so many people raised that way change their emotions to fit the facts?" I'm not sure how to respond to this, because you're asking this as if there's a fact of the matter about what's good and bad. But obviously I don't accept that.
@@KaneB - I know. I'm unsure how to phrase this in a way that doesn't imply that. I mean that they change their attitude because of a belief that something is 'really' good or bad (even if that belief is not true). I guess my point is that, "not changing your beliefs when you hear something you feel is bad, is 'really' good" applies both ways (to a racist or homophobe not changing when they hear those are bad, as well as in the direction you say). I guess that itself isn't very important. But people do seem to change in response to this sort of thing (look at how attitudes changed on these issues). Then again that may be due to social pressure, not to a belief that something is 'really good.'
@@WorthlessWinner Okay, so I've tried a couple of times to respond to your comment, and youtube keeps automatically removing my response. Not sure what to do about that. You're welcome to contact me elsewhere if you're really desperate to read the response!
@@KaneB - RUclips's AI deleting someone's comments on their own video is convincing me objectively wrong things exist ;P I can't imagine a response to my comment offensive enough to need deleting but whatever. I was probably wrong anyway. It's true that beliefs impact our values, but this might not counter the specific example you gave (of knowing something is "objectively (im)moral" changing value) and that example may be the only one relevant to error theory.
I have to say that the "pragmatic turn" in still using faulty moral language after accepting error theory (or any other language in a similar case) is an argument for accepting revolutionary fictionalism as, at least how I see it, that is effectively what it is. It is using these faulty concepts as "useful fictions" because getting wrid of them completely would seem very unpractical such as in the example of fuel in a car tank, I couldn't "function" with people without the language.
Thank you very much, @Kane B ! I have a curiosity. You are partially supporting your position on error theory by appealing to a more coherent overall philosophical view. In particular, you make the case that it is a useful fiction to assume free will, and that a noncognitivist view of morality (as opposed to an error theoretic one), would not cohere well with such fictionalization. In the end, one thing is to assume something as a fiction (a falsehood) and another one to approve or disapprove it. I would now push you a bit more not on the fiction side but on the useful side. Let us say that free will is a useful fiction. Wouldn't the same coherence call for you to consider the moral judgements not only as false (error theory) but as useful...? You made the analogy of models in science, taken as idealizations or approximations, which are false but pragmatically key to further some aims at systematization, explanation, prediction and control of nature. I wonder how well does the analogy carry out to morality on the pragmatic side. There could be moral facts that we could not reach but only represent in terms of culturally, historically and idiosyncratically affected moral judgements, as there are physical facts that we could only represent through models and theories so affected. On the other hand, different possible moral judgements on a particular situation may arise from underdetermination of the "moral data". The only thing that would be missing in the analogy is the fact that consensus is easier to find in the sciences than in morality. But I guess the peculiarity here arise from the fact that in morality the subject analyzing the theory/model and the object of such theory/model are of one and the same type... In other words, accepting accepting that moral judgements are false does not compel you to regard moral facts as nonexistent. You can make perfectly good sense of a realist about the external physical world that is also a scientific anti-realist. One could sustain that the real world exist and also that we are generally incapable of represent it except in using imperfect, simplified, idealized or approximated means (models and theories), which are most likely (strictly) false. In just the same way, one could also be a realist about moral facts and holding an error theory view about moral judgements...
Yay, welcome to the correct position! Thank you for making this video, it is giving me such thoughts. I think there's an important question that may lead error theorists too in a somewhat quasi-realist direction, which is, what do we do with all of this moral language we have laying around? Especially considering that some of it is really useful as non-moral shorthand, such as ordinary hypothetical imperatives. I'm doing my part by simply not saying that I think things are right or wrong, but rather stating that I am for or against things, and maybe giving my reasons in terms of things that I value. I still do lots of "should"-ing, but again, it's too damn useful to throw away. If cornered, I think I could define the normativity out of any "should" statement I make though. btw, I'm an error theorist toward normativity in general, including epistemic normativity, so I have a similar approach to "which beliefs are justified" type questions that I do toward "what is right or wrong" type questions. I think this ends up being the only consistent approach (and I do value consistency!) due to companions-in-guilt arguments. There's also an important "what now" question, which I gave my answer to at length in this document that I hope you won't mind me linking to here: docs.google.com/document/d/1fKnMrRBuTZbLaIV6otrb5G1gFJL5u3UGqvTeyEiwSCQ/edit?usp=sharing
@@exalted_kitharode That's a great question that I don't know the answer to. I'm Googling and I'm mainly finding people who would like to answer companions in guilt arguments by saying that epistemic and moral reasons are different somehow, rather than simply accepting that epistemic normativity falls by the same sword as moral normativity. But you want a sketch of what justification would look like then, and all I can say is that it would be subjective. There wouldn't be an objective answer to the question of when a belief is justified. But as with moral justification, we could still say that a belief objectively fulfills certain standards, such as being implied by certain observations, and if two agents hold those standards in common then they agree to consider that belief knowledge. Beyond that, I'm sure lots of people have had smart things to say about that, but all I can think for either of us to do is Google around about relevant terms like epistemological skepticism, companions in guilt, etc.
@@exalted_kitharode Bart Streumer, for example. He defends a normative error theory in general (thus including epistemic error theory) in his book, "Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgements" (2017).
Hi everyone! I have a question. How does a Error Theory deal with a presupposition failure and after that keep be a cognitivist moral theory?I mean if a central presupposition of moral realism is false, namely, “there are an objective moral properties” -false, therefore a moral judgment that depend on it suffer from lack of a truth-value( it can’t be either true or false, it doesn’t posses a truth -aptness). So we can’t name the error theory as a cognitivist moral position. Of course it would be a valid argument if we accept a Frege-Strawson position concerning the presupposition failure. Please give me some answers to my deliberation and some literature about a very discussion on a status of predisposition failure within the Error Theory. Many thanks !
There is some problem with error theory. It allows us to do something like that p - false and non p - false as well, but this consideration violates a logical point, namely, if p - false, hence non p has to be true( if we use a propositional logic). So how does ET overcome it?
I know you didn't ask me, but this is an interesting problem so I want to take a shot at it. I think what you've presented is only a problem if we think of "right" and "wrong" as dichotomous. If we say there is a morally neutral position, neither right nor wrong, error theory can entail that the neutral position is true of everything.
Yeah, who said that that negation of "x is bad" looks like "x is good"? I think it was explained in the video on ET, negation of moral propositions is true. For example, "x is not good" and "x is not bad" are both true.
I never said "I will never cut my hair." My position was rather: I'm not going to cut my hair at the moment, because I like having long hair. But I realized a couple of weeks ago that although I used to like long hair, I don't much care about it anymore. This removed the reason not to cut my hair.
@@KaneB you said "I will never cut my hair just because you guys tell me it looks like shit. I have my own principles and I don't care how you see me."
@@bokramubokramu8834 First, I didn't say that. But second, even if I did say it -- and I do endorse the spirit of that quote -- my position hasn't changed. I didn't cut my hair just because some people on RUclips didn't like it.
@@KaneB "I didn't say that". Of course it is not an actual quote. But you did say that by using different words "I didn't cut my hair just because some people on RUclips didn't like it". Well actually that's precisely why you cut it. Which is actually not bad at all. But for some weird reason you have issues owning your action. Even to yourself most likely.
@@bokramubokramu8834 I used to like long hair significantly more than short hair. I no longer do. That's what changed. If I still liked long hair significantly more than short hair, I wouldn't have cut it. People on RUclips have been telling me to cut my hair for years. I even made a dating video before, a couple of years ago. People were telling me to cut my hair back then as well. There have been times when I changed my appearance, in conflict with my own values, in order to become more conventionally attractive. Most notably when I shaved off the neckbeard. I had no issues "owning" my reasons in that case. I did it simply because I wanted to look more attractive to others, and I stated this openly on the channel. I also kinda hated myself for doing this, but I had no problem being open about my reasons. Also, the dating is going quite well at the moment. So there wasn't even a pressing need to cut my hair.
This is unrelated to the video: But you mentioned in another video that you were skeptical of evolutionary psychology. Will you summarise your criticism of that field in a future video?
6:08 "In general, meaning is indeterminate." Meaning is the idea that a person intends to express when she makes a statement. When we investigate the meaning of morality we try to capture what goes on in people's minds when they use moral language. There may be practical barriers that prevent us from easily observing the minds of people, but surely there is a determined answer. 6:12 "I see a lot of philosophy as being a matter of conceptual engineering. Where we take everyday concepts that are vague, messy, imprecise, and we revise those concepts to make them more precise." This makes it sound like we're building something new. We don't like X, so we're going to engineer something new that can fill the role of X and be even better than X. Doing that serves a purpose in some contexts, but it's no way to improve our understanding of X. For example, imagine Alice has heard about the Eiffel tower, but she is frustrated by having no idea what the "Eiffel tower" refers to. The conceptual engineering approach to solving this problem would be for Alice to build a tower in her backyard and declare this to be the Eiffel tower. Now whenever she hears the phrase Eiffel tower or uses that phrase herself, she'll know what it refers to very precisely, but this solution isn't real. She's just invented a new meaning for "Eiffel tower" that doesn't reflect the meaning in the minds of other people. What Alice really ought to be trying to do is explore what goes on in the minds of people who use the phrase "Eiffel tower" so she might find where the actual tower exists in Paris. In most cases this approach will be far more useful than conceptual engineering. If a concept is vague, messy, and imprecise, then we should seek to understand how it is vague, where it is messy, and what are the limits of its precision, rather than try to replace it with something better. 6:44 "The practice of making moral judgements, I take that to be a fairly useful institution." Isn't that a strange thing for an error theorist to say? That's like saying that stories about vampires are a fairly useful institution. Perhaps instead of saying "useful" we should instead say "entertaining". The practice of making moral judgements is an entertaining institution. 7:08 "Sometimes they're just expressing attitudes. If you think about people going to a protest... They might be making moral statements while they are doing this, and that seems more like an expression of emotion." People don't usually protest just to express their emotions. People go to protests because they want to draw attention to something in the world. No matter how much Alice hates vanilla ice cream, she's never going to organize a protest against vanilla because she's aware that her hatred of vanilla is just a subjective feeling and there's no reason to expect anyone else to share her feeling no matter how much attention she draws to it. In contrast, suppose there were a serial killer picking off people in a community and the police are failing to catch the killer. Alice might protest this because there's something real to draw people's attention to. When she says, "The killer is bad," she's not just saying that she hates the killer; she's saying that the killer is hurting our community, making people afraid to go out, taking away our loved ones, etc. There are objective facts that she's trying to make people see, and so she protests. 21:35 "If our moral judgements were trying to represent facts about the world, then in this scenario where we have a moral property detector, our moral judgements should then match that, but I would say that would make no difference." What is the moral property detector measuring? When the needle goes left to detect the badness of murder, what is the detector looking at and analyzing? If we were to build such a detector, we'd have to understand its mechanism, but it's not hard to see what makes murder bad. The detector just needs to be aware of the pain, the fear, the loss, the grief. We need to build the detector so that it sees all the many ways that murder hurts people. If that's what the detector measures, then it certainly would make a difference to my moral judgements. If such a detector declared homosexuality to be bad, we'd obviously wonder if the detector is somehow malfunctioning because it would be bizarre for homosexuality to hurt people to an extent akin to murder, but we would not casually dismiss this detection because the consequences are so grave. We'd want to examine the detector more carefully and work out exactly what is causing this measurement.
"There may be practical barriers that prevent us from easily observing the minds of people, but surely there is a determined answer." Mental content is indeterminate too in my view. "This makes it sound like we're building something new. We don't like X, so we're going to engineer something new that can fill the role of X and be even better than X. Doing that serves a purpose in some contexts, but it's no way to improve our understanding of X." Yes. Conceptual engineering of some concept doesn't really aim to improve our understanding of the concept. Rather the aim is to improve/replace the concept. "For example, imagine Alice has heard about the Eiffel tower, but she is frustrated by having no idea what the "Eiffel tower" refers to. The conceptual engineering approach to solving this problem would be for Alice to build a tower in her backyard and declare this to be the Eiffel tower." I suppose that might be a kind of conceptual engineering, but it would be a very silly way to do it. Obviously, not every proposed conceptual revision will be sensible. This is also the case for conceptual analysis. I could give the following conceptual analysis of "knowledge": knowledge = unjustified false belief. Well, that would be a silly conceptual analysis of "knowledge". But this isn't an argument against doing conceptual analysis. "Isn't that a strange thing for an error theorist to say?" Not strange at all. I'm actually rather surprised to see you ask this question, given how often you extol the virtues of skepticism. Anyway, there are lots of situations in which discourse that presupposes a falsehood can be useful. For example, just consider all the false scientific theories that have been, and in some cases continue to be, powerful tools for predicting and controlling phenomena. Moral discourse is useful in different ways. "People don't usually protest just to express their emotions. People go to protests because they want to draw attention to something in the world." Yes. And the noncognitivist will say that you draw attention to it, in order to express emotions about it, or to express commands about it, or whatever. Expressing emotion about X and drawing attention to X are not mutually exclusive. "If that's what the detector measures, then it certainly would make a difference to my moral judgements. If such a detector declared homosexuality to be bad, we'd obviously wonder if the detector is somehow malfunctioning because it would be bizarre for homosexuality to hurt people to an extent akin to murder, but we would not casually dismiss this detection because the consequences are so grave." In the scenario I'm describing, the detector measures the moral properties of the action, but our beliefs about the non-moral properties, such as the pain, fear, loss, number of people injured, etc., do not change. So it turns out that certain behaviours are morally wrong, even though they don't cause any suffering. Given your commitment to moral naturalism, this is obviously incoherent from your point of view. I take it that your position would be that the suffering *just is* the negative moral value.
@@KaneB "Just consider all the false scientific theories that have been, and in some cases continue to be, powerful tools for predicting and controlling phenomena." Is that the sort of usefulness that we get by making moral judgements? Do moral judgements help us predict or control something? What is meant when we say that moral judgements are useful? "Expressing emotion about X and drawing attention to X are not mutually exclusive." Yet the point of drawing attention to a thing is that we expect there are observable facts that people will see when their attention is drawn, and these observables are the point of the protest. At least it would be highly dubious to characterize protests as being primarily concerned with emotions while many protesters are surely concerned with facts. Protesters are often emotional and they often express their emotions, but they almost always want people to hear more than just "I'm angry about this." The general public would have no reason to care about that. "So it turns out that certain behaviours are morally wrong, even though they don't cause any suffering." We cannot have a detector without something to detect. The detector was presented as the best case scenario for moral realism, but it's not the best case scenario if the scenario also includes an assumption that moral realism is false and the morality detector is actually measuring nothing, but just wiggling a needle for no reason. If this is truly a best case scenario for moral realism, then we need to have something real in mind for the detector to measure, or at least be open to the possibility that morality might be something real like suffering. "I take it that your position would be that the suffering just is the negative moral value." That is a natural conclusion that seems to follow when we attempt to find the meaning of morality based on observing how people use moral language and avoiding conceptual engineering.
The negation of a statement expressing a moral judgment also expresses a moral judgment. According to error theory, both statements would be false. How can be a statement and its negation both be false? It only seems to work if there's a third possibility besides 'right' or 'wrong' for actions to be, e.g. 'all actions are whatever (i.e. neither right nor wrong)'. But the added nothion of 'whateverness' doesn't really bring anything to the table, so the more parsimonious theory is still non-cognitivism.
New haircut looks good! But I can't help but remembering that a month ago in the dating video comments, Kane replied to Maclin Kastex that: "I'm not offended, but I'm also not going to cut my hair. I mean, I do give some consideration to how I appear to others, but at the same time, I think a degree of authenticity is important as well."
My principles haven't changed. But I realized that I don't actually care that much about long hair anymore. So with that, there was no reason to keep it.
20:30 It seems to me that your response that you don't care what the morality detector says, is itself a moral judgement. You've already decided, presuppositionally, that you don't care what the detector says. You're not being honestly agnostic and investigating, really. In other words, you actually aren't buying into the premise of the hypothetical, that it genuinely *is* detecting moral facts. If you Genuinely believed it did, you wouldn't say "I don't care". That's ridiculous. You would only say that if you were narrow minded, blinded by confirmation bias, or the like. It's almost as if you believe your own judgements can't be flawed or something. It's so strange. How can you not be curious whatsoever? Have you never watched a movie, thought it was great, then someone points out an obvious plothole you missed (a fact about the movie), and now you judge it as crap? This is what we're dealing with. Even if it's your own subjective judgements, they can still be "wrong" even in a subjective sense. I want you to take this criticism seriously, you're not giving the hypothetical the weight it deserves, you're not actually imagining it being a moral fact detector. To really hammer this home, imagine that we instead built a descriptive fact detector. We point it at the proposition "water is made of h2o molecules" and the arrows swings over to the "true" section. We point it at a proposition that says "The sun is a ball of ice" and it jumps to "false". We do this hundreds of times, neigh thousands of times, until there's no doubt in your mind that the detector is accurate. Of course some facts are boring, and others are exciting. Now suppose you're an admitted history nerd, much like you're a metaethics nerd. It is a topic you actually care about, and so you point the detector at a proposition about Socrates' death, say that he died of hemlock poisoning. And to your surprise, the detector jumps to "false". You cannot both believe the detector is accurate, whilst also denying the detector, saying that you just choose to believe he died of hemlock poisoning anyway. The ONLY way you can logically make this argument, is if you weren't convinced the detector was telling the truth. So please, take the hypothetical seriously and re-evaluate it.
"It seems to me that your response that you don't care what the morality detector says, is itself a moral judgement" It's just a description of how I would react. It's a psychological fact about me. I'm not seeing how I'm making any moral judgment here. "It's almost as if you believe your own judgements can't be flawed or something" Well, my reaction to the hypothetical is that it seems like my moral judgments are not even attempting to describe reality. Which is why I initially took this hypothetical as a reason to favour noncognitivism. "imagine that we instead built a descriptive fact detector" Obviously my judgments would line up with the measurements of a descriptive fact detector. So I would respond differently in the case of a moral property detector and a non-moral property detector. That's the whole point of the thought experiment. Beliefs have a "mind to world" direction of fit: when we form a belief, we are trying to match what we take the facts to be. Moral judgments don't seem to be like this. Not for me, at least. "You cannot both believe the detector is accurate, whilst also denying the detector, saying that you just choose to believe he died of hemlock poisoning anyway" It's not that I would deny what the moral property detector says. If it says that e.g. slavery is good, then I would conclude that it's a fact that slavery is good. But it would make no difference practically. I would continue to object to slavery, I would continue to condemn people who engage in slavery, I would continue to praise people who try to eradicate it, etc. But there is something very strange about this situation. It seems like if I say, "X is morally good", while at the same time sincerely objecting to X, and trying to prevent others from doing X, then my statement isn't really expressing *moral* concepts, even though it uses moral language.
@@KaneB "It's just a description of how I would react. It's a psychological fact about me. I'm not seeing how I'm making any moral judgment here." This is the crux of the issue. I don't see how you could have studied philosophy, or ethics specifically, and come to this conclusion. There's a billion different moral theories out there, but I doubt any of them would reject the parallel that all moral claims are ultimately an expression of an individual's goals, and goals they think others should have. You can think of it as reframing the "what is good?" question into "what goals should I have?". I'm gonna use that framing from now on because it will make my point clearer. If you think slavery is wrong, that's because you have some goal that you want to achieve, that you think slavery is in opposition to. It might be the goal of reducing harm, making sure no one is violating rules of consent, rights from god, whatever. You might say "No it's not a goal, it's just a feeling, an attitude or a stance I hold. Not a proposition about the world". But then I will simply implore you to think about what goal the feeling, attitude or stance you hold is serving, because it is going to be serving one, guaranteed. You have basic intuitive goals that you ought to eat to day. You have trivial goals that you should probably go to sleep early, and so on. Now you might describe it as a mere psychological fact about you, that you think these things, but that's a cop-out. ALL goals you have are ultimately moral ones. And you can check this by asking questions such as "why do I want to fulfil this goal X? Oh right, because it is a step towards this moral goal Y" Now we get to the concern I am raising. I'm telling you that there's this goal X (learning the morality detector's outputs) that I care about, which you also should care about. You don't get to simply say that you don't share the goal, and that's a psychological fact about you, rather than a moral judgement. You're free to say you don't care about it, but then just acknowledge the reason why, which goal has priority over caring about the detector. And if you can't answer that question, all I can say is, THINK HARDER. What if i were to say it's just a psychological fact about me, that I don't care about slavery, and so therefore I'm not making a moral judgement on it? If I were to pass by a stranger in captivity, I would bear no responsibility towards helping the person escape, for I have no "moral judgements" or "goals" about whether slavery should exist or not. Would you accept such an answer? I doubt it. So be more consistent and demand the same of yourself. Treat yourself like you would a different person who holds a different view. You don't know if you have the right moral goals or not, much like you can never be certain if the reality you percieve is the true reality, merely an approximation, or wrong altogether. You have to be critical and reevaluate constantly. With this in mind, you cannot seriously tell me that if you came across a morality detector, that you earnestly believed could tell you right from wrong better than your own judgements could, that you wouldn't care what it says. It literally makes no sense to think so, unless you're lying and don't care about morality afterall.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter Well, I have studied philosophy. I've done a BA, MA, and am currently nearing the end of a PhD. Anyway, it seems to me that you're completing missing the point of the hypothetical. (The penultimate sentence of your comment, for example, suggests that you're just not understanding what I'm saying.) Unfortunately, I can't be bothered to go the trouble of explaining this, at least not over text. I'd be happy to do it over voice chat, if you'd like.
@@KaneB I understand completely what you're saying, and I'm rejecting it. I repeat, it's a cop-out answer. Whatever property the detector is picking up, that property is the one your goal should be focused on. You DO NOT get to say you "don't care". To say that is to implicitly state your judgements supercede the detector, which they can't by definition if you believe the detector is describing a FACT about the world. Only way you can get out of it is by lying about your opinion of the detector's reliability. Which also defeats the purpose of the hypothetical. It really is that simple. Think. Harder. Let me know when you figure it out.
@@viinisaari What have been the consequences of all the people writing "based"? Genuine question. I can't say that any (specific, unique) consequences occur to me.
I think suffering is bad. Specifically extreme, avoidable, unnecessary suffering is bad. I don't think skepticism about the badness of suffering is practical or even interesting. Moral values, and epistemic values as well, are subjective. It's a shame but that's the world we live in. We do the best we can with what we've got, even if it's absurd.
Dude you look really good, sharp after that hair cut/shave.
Looking neat, mate. Your chances with the ladies just rose by 300 %
23:45 That's the smoothest Steely Dan reference I have ever seen. You are awesome.
A genealogical account of *why* all those noncognitivists have made so many concessions to the moral-realist position would be very interesting, but I guess that's more a project of intellectual history than it is one of philosophy, I suppose.
meet attractive philosophical positions in your doxastic neighbourhood (attaches the thumbnail)
How about the Gibbard-style expressivist view? (My preferred non-cognitivist view). This view explains why we can usually consistently (and usefully!) act as if moral statements have truth values: The semantics of moral statements just happens to be formally very similar to the semantics of propositions. (Moral statements are modeled with sets of "hyperplans" while propositions are modeled with sets of possible worlds).
I think of this as being similar to the case of 'caloric' in the scientific analysis of heat (it turns out the dynamical equations that model fluids can also be used to model heat, so the hypothesis that there was some fluid 'caloric' that flowed between bodies seemed to make sense). To me, the expressivist, modeling moral statements as truth-apt is like modeling heat as a fluid. It yields good predictions, sure, but there's a much deeper explanation of *why* it yields good predictions. So it's kind of an error theory for cognitivism, in that it gives an explanation as to why the cognitivist position can be so attractive, despite being false.
I also like the expressivist view for the practical role it identifies for morality: it's about planning, it's about figuring out which things to do and endorsing or rejecting plans for what to do. I think this speaks to your concern about the pragmatic role of moral statements. (How attractive you find this feature may depend on how you want to treat distinctions between semantics and pragmatics)
Although I can imagine some variant of the Gibbard-style expressivism as being compatible with some cognitivism, where we adopt a kind of two-dimensional semantics for statements (moral and non-moral alike). If we're error theorists we can say that all the moral statements are false despite having some non-trivial content on the hyperplan side of things. If we're some species of moral realists, I suppose we can say some moral statements are true. But in this case, I'm not really sure what role "truth" or "falsity" is supposed to serve, since it seems we can model moral discourse perfectly well without it.
also the haircut is really flattering!
You should also explain why you changed your hair (just kidding). I went through the same transition from noncognitivism to error theory several years ago after reading Richard Joyce's book Myth of Morality. Nowadays, I tend to blend noncognitivism with error theory, just because one metaethical theory doesn't seem to be able to exhaust all the possible folk reasons why people make moral judgements. Some moral judgements are based on almost pure emotion, while others are more rationalistic, while still others are, well, religious. I see moral judgements as being a psychological reaction most of the time, rather than philosophical. Regardless, it seems to me the moral reaction comes first, then the post-hoc explanation---sometimes expressed as a truth-apt objective rational principle, and sometimes expressed in emotive terms (e.g. disgust).
19:30 our cognitive beliefs can change our emotions. Just a generation ago, a lot of people were as homophobic as you say, but changing cognitive beliefs altered that. It's not automatic but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Finding out that something you emotionally think is bad, "isn't actually bad in some objective sense" (not to say objective morals exist, i mean that objective arguments that the thing isn't harmful or that it's incoherent with our other beliefs get brought up) is an experience a lot of people go through over the course of their life and many of them manage to change their feelings to adapt to that. If we found out something we currently feel & think is good was actually bad, the rational thing to do would be to try (even if it were hard) to change our emotions, just as it is for those other people.
If "I don't care about the facts then" is the correct response when your emotional judgement conflicts with "objective morality," why do we get mad at people who were raised racist or homophobic who don't change when they're shown that those things are bad, and why do so many people raised that way change their emotions to fit the facts? You seem rational so I doubt you really would refuse to change your emotions if convincing proof that something you currently feel is good were actually bad got provided (hell you're old enough that you've probably already gone through that process yourself!).
23:00 when people get those sorts of extreme beliefs like the external world doesn't exist, it does seem to change their behavior a lot (then again such people tend to be mentally ill) so I don't think your intuition that it wouldn't alter behavior is correct. Humans aren't the "belief in, emotion/action out" machines some think us to be, but beliefs still have a big impact on how we act - if you were convinced everyone else was a "zombie" then you'd presumably have less qualms about hurting them for your own benefit, if you were convinced the world wasn't real it'd presumably make you less afraid of jumping off cliffs, etc.
"why do we get mad at people who were raised racist or homophobic who don't change when they're shown that those things are bad, and why do so many people raised that way change their emotions to fit the facts?"
I'm not sure how to respond to this, because you're asking this as if there's a fact of the matter about what's good and bad. But obviously I don't accept that.
@@KaneB - I know. I'm unsure how to phrase this in a way that doesn't imply that. I mean that they change their attitude because of a belief that something is 'really' good or bad (even if that belief is not true).
I guess my point is that, "not changing your beliefs when you hear something you feel is bad, is 'really' good" applies both ways (to a racist or homophobe not changing when they hear those are bad, as well as in the direction you say).
I guess that itself isn't very important. But people do seem to change in response to this sort of thing (look at how attitudes changed on these issues). Then again that may be due to social pressure, not to a belief that something is 'really good.'
@@WorthlessWinner Okay, so I've tried a couple of times to respond to your comment, and youtube keeps automatically removing my response. Not sure what to do about that. You're welcome to contact me elsewhere if you're really desperate to read the response!
@@KaneB - RUclips's AI deleting someone's comments on their own video is convincing me objectively wrong things exist ;P
I can't imagine a response to my comment offensive enough to need deleting but whatever.
I was probably wrong anyway.
It's true that beliefs impact our values, but this might not counter the specific example you gave (of knowing something is "objectively (im)moral" changing value) and that example may be the only one relevant to error theory.
С новой стрижкой ты кажешься совершенно другим человеком.
that emotional outburst at the end really made me get it. also i like the haircut
I can hear Cole sounding her barbaric yawp from afar
I have to say that the "pragmatic turn" in still using faulty moral language after accepting error theory (or any other language in a similar case) is an argument for accepting revolutionary fictionalism as, at least how I see it, that is effectively what it is. It is using these faulty concepts as "useful fictions" because getting wrid of them completely would seem very unpractical such as in the example of fuel in a car tank, I couldn't "function" with people without the language.
Thank you very much, @Kane B ! I have a curiosity. You are partially supporting your position on error theory by appealing to a more coherent overall philosophical view. In particular, you make the case that it is a useful fiction to assume free will, and that a noncognitivist view of morality (as opposed to an error theoretic one), would not cohere well with such fictionalization. In the end, one thing is to assume something as a fiction (a falsehood) and another one to approve or disapprove it. I would now push you a bit more not on the fiction side but on the useful side. Let us say that free will is a useful fiction. Wouldn't the same coherence call for you to consider the moral judgements not only as false (error theory) but as useful...? You made the analogy of models in science, taken as idealizations or approximations, which are false but pragmatically key to further some aims at systematization, explanation, prediction and control of nature. I wonder how well does the analogy carry out to morality on the pragmatic side. There could be moral facts that we could not reach but only represent in terms of culturally, historically and idiosyncratically affected moral judgements, as there are physical facts that we could only represent through models and theories so affected. On the other hand, different possible moral judgements on a particular situation may arise from underdetermination of the "moral data". The only thing that would be missing in the analogy is the fact that consensus is easier to find in the sciences than in morality. But I guess the peculiarity here arise from the fact that in morality the subject analyzing the theory/model and the object of such theory/model are of one and the same type...
In other words, accepting accepting that moral judgements are false does not compel you to regard moral facts as nonexistent. You can make perfectly good sense of a realist about the external physical world that is also a scientific anti-realist. One could sustain that the real world exist and also that we are generally incapable of represent it except in using imperfect, simplified, idealized or approximated means (models and theories), which are most likely (strictly) false. In just the same way, one could also be a realist about moral facts and holding an error theory view about moral judgements...
You look great! And, as always, I appreciate the time and effort you put into these videos.
Yay, welcome to the correct position! Thank you for making this video, it is giving me such thoughts.
I think there's an important question that may lead error theorists too in a somewhat quasi-realist direction, which is, what do we do with all of this moral language we have laying around? Especially considering that some of it is really useful as non-moral shorthand, such as ordinary hypothetical imperatives.
I'm doing my part by simply not saying that I think things are right or wrong, but rather stating that I am for or against things, and maybe giving my reasons in terms of things that I value. I still do lots of "should"-ing, but again, it's too damn useful to throw away. If cornered, I think I could define the normativity out of any "should" statement I make though.
btw, I'm an error theorist toward normativity in general, including epistemic normativity, so I have a similar approach to "which beliefs are justified" type questions that I do toward "what is right or wrong" type questions. I think this ends up being the only consistent approach (and I do value consistency!) due to companions-in-guilt arguments.
There's also an important "what now" question, which I gave my answer to at length in this document that I hope you won't mind me linking to here:
docs.google.com/document/d/1fKnMrRBuTZbLaIV6otrb5G1gFJL5u3UGqvTeyEiwSCQ/edit?usp=sharing
Could you please mention some authors on this type of epistemic position?
Because I wanted at least sketch of how justification would look like if we take that kind of strategy.
@@exalted_kitharode That's a great question that I don't know the answer to. I'm Googling and I'm mainly finding people who would like to answer companions in guilt arguments by saying that epistemic and moral reasons are different somehow, rather than simply accepting that epistemic normativity falls by the same sword as moral normativity.
But you want a sketch of what justification would look like then, and all I can say is that it would be subjective. There wouldn't be an objective answer to the question of when a belief is justified. But as with moral justification, we could still say that a belief objectively fulfills certain standards, such as being implied by certain observations, and if two agents hold those standards in common then they agree to consider that belief knowledge.
Beyond that, I'm sure lots of people have had smart things to say about that, but all I can think for either of us to do is Google around about relevant terms like epistemological skepticism, companions in guilt, etc.
@@theoutsiderhumanist8159, thanks.
@@exalted_kitharode Bart Streumer, for example. He defends a normative error theory in general (thus including epistemic error theory) in his book, "Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgements" (2017).
Holy shit you look so different now. I like it.
This video proves that even a living god can get a haircut.
Hi everyone!
I have a question. How does a Error Theory deal with a presupposition failure and after that keep be a cognitivist moral theory?I mean if a central presupposition of moral realism is false, namely, “there are an objective moral properties” -false, therefore a moral judgment that depend on it suffer from lack of a truth-value( it can’t be either true or false, it doesn’t posses a truth -aptness). So we can’t name the error theory as a cognitivist moral position. Of course it would be a valid argument if we accept a Frege-Strawson position concerning the presupposition failure. Please give me some answers to my deliberation and some literature about a very discussion on a status of predisposition failure within the Error Theory. Many thanks !
There is some problem with error theory. It allows us to do something like that p - false and non p - false as well, but this consideration violates a logical point, namely, if p - false, hence non p has to be true( if we use a propositional logic). So how does ET overcome it?
I know you didn't ask me, but this is an interesting problem so I want to take a shot at it. I think what you've presented is only a problem if we think of "right" and "wrong" as dichotomous. If we say there is a morally neutral position, neither right nor wrong, error theory can entail that the neutral position is true of everything.
Yeah, who said that that negation of "x is bad" looks like "x is good"? I think it was explained in the video on ET, negation of moral propositions is true. For example, "x is not good" and "x is not bad" are both true.
See: Bart Streumer and Daniel Wodak "Why formal objections to the error theory fail"
@@theoutsiderhumanist8159 TY!
@@exalted_kitharode TY
Welcome to the resistance, comrade!
Didn´t know the guy from trainspotting was so knowledgeable about Metaethics :0
ewen mcgreggor philosophy lecture. its a great look
Looking sharp!
Mister "I will never cut my hair because I have principles".
I never said "I will never cut my hair." My position was rather: I'm not going to cut my hair at the moment, because I like having long hair. But I realized a couple of weeks ago that although I used to like long hair, I don't much care about it anymore. This removed the reason not to cut my hair.
@@KaneB you said "I will never cut my hair just because you guys tell me it looks like shit. I have my own principles and I don't care how you see me."
@@bokramubokramu8834 First, I didn't say that. But second, even if I did say it -- and I do endorse the spirit of that quote -- my position hasn't changed. I didn't cut my hair just because some people on RUclips didn't like it.
@@KaneB "I didn't say that". Of course it is not an actual quote. But you did say that by using different words
"I didn't cut my hair just because some people on RUclips didn't like it". Well actually that's precisely why you cut it. Which is actually not bad at all. But for some weird reason you have issues owning your action. Even to yourself most likely.
@@bokramubokramu8834 I used to like long hair significantly more than short hair. I no longer do. That's what changed. If I still liked long hair significantly more than short hair, I wouldn't have cut it.
People on RUclips have been telling me to cut my hair for years. I even made a dating video before, a couple of years ago. People were telling me to cut my hair back then as well.
There have been times when I changed my appearance, in conflict with my own values, in order to become more conventionally attractive. Most notably when I shaved off the neckbeard. I had no issues "owning" my reasons in that case. I did it simply because I wanted to look more attractive to others, and I stated this openly on the channel. I also kinda hated myself for doing this, but I had no problem being open about my reasons.
Also, the dating is going quite well at the moment. So there wasn't even a pressing need to cut my hair.
This is unrelated to the video: But you mentioned in another video that you were skeptical of evolutionary psychology. Will you summarise your criticism of that field in a future video?
6:08 "In general, meaning is indeterminate."
Meaning is the idea that a person intends to express when she makes a statement. When we investigate the meaning of morality we try to capture what goes on in people's minds when they use moral language. There may be practical barriers that prevent us from easily observing the minds of people, but surely there is a determined answer.
6:12 "I see a lot of philosophy as being a matter of conceptual engineering. Where we take everyday concepts that are vague, messy, imprecise, and we revise those concepts to make them more precise."
This makes it sound like we're building something new. We don't like X, so we're going to engineer something new that can fill the role of X and be even better than X. Doing that serves a purpose in some contexts, but it's no way to improve our understanding of X.
For example, imagine Alice has heard about the Eiffel tower, but she is frustrated by having no idea what the "Eiffel tower" refers to. The conceptual engineering approach to solving this problem would be for Alice to build a tower in her backyard and declare this to be the Eiffel tower. Now whenever she hears the phrase Eiffel tower or uses that phrase herself, she'll know what it refers to very precisely, but this solution isn't real. She's just invented a new meaning for "Eiffel tower" that doesn't reflect the meaning in the minds of other people.
What Alice really ought to be trying to do is explore what goes on in the minds of people who use the phrase "Eiffel tower" so she might find where the actual tower exists in Paris. In most cases this approach will be far more useful than conceptual engineering. If a concept is vague, messy, and imprecise, then we should seek to understand how it is vague, where it is messy, and what are the limits of its precision, rather than try to replace it with something better.
6:44 "The practice of making moral judgements, I take that to be a fairly useful institution."
Isn't that a strange thing for an error theorist to say? That's like saying that stories about vampires are a fairly useful institution. Perhaps instead of saying "useful" we should instead say "entertaining". The practice of making moral judgements is an entertaining institution.
7:08 "Sometimes they're just expressing attitudes. If you think about people going to a protest... They might be making moral statements while they are doing this, and that seems more like an expression of emotion."
People don't usually protest just to express their emotions. People go to protests because they want to draw attention to something in the world. No matter how much Alice hates vanilla ice cream, she's never going to organize a protest against vanilla because she's aware that her hatred of vanilla is just a subjective feeling and there's no reason to expect anyone else to share her feeling no matter how much attention she draws to it.
In contrast, suppose there were a serial killer picking off people in a community and the police are failing to catch the killer. Alice might protest this because there's something real to draw people's attention to. When she says, "The killer is bad," she's not just saying that she hates the killer; she's saying that the killer is hurting our community, making people afraid to go out, taking away our loved ones, etc. There are objective facts that she's trying to make people see, and so she protests.
21:35 "If our moral judgements were trying to represent facts about the world, then in this scenario where we have a moral property detector, our moral judgements should then match that, but I would say that would make no difference."
What is the moral property detector measuring? When the needle goes left to detect the badness of murder, what is the detector looking at and analyzing? If we were to build such a detector, we'd have to understand its mechanism, but it's not hard to see what makes murder bad. The detector just needs to be aware of the pain, the fear, the loss, the grief. We need to build the detector so that it sees all the many ways that murder hurts people.
If that's what the detector measures, then it certainly would make a difference to my moral judgements. If such a detector declared homosexuality to be bad, we'd obviously wonder if the detector is somehow malfunctioning because it would be bizarre for homosexuality to hurt people to an extent akin to murder, but we would not casually dismiss this detection because the consequences are so grave. We'd want to examine the detector more carefully and work out exactly what is causing this measurement.
"There may be practical barriers that prevent us from easily observing the minds of people, but surely there is a determined answer."
Mental content is indeterminate too in my view.
"This makes it sound like we're building something new. We don't like X, so we're going to engineer something new that can fill the role of X and be even better than X. Doing that serves a purpose in some contexts, but it's no way to improve our understanding of X."
Yes. Conceptual engineering of some concept doesn't really aim to improve our understanding of the concept. Rather the aim is to improve/replace the concept.
"For example, imagine Alice has heard about the Eiffel tower, but she is frustrated by having no idea what the "Eiffel tower" refers to. The conceptual engineering approach to solving this problem would be for Alice to build a tower in her backyard and declare this to be the Eiffel tower."
I suppose that might be a kind of conceptual engineering, but it would be a very silly way to do it. Obviously, not every proposed conceptual revision will be sensible. This is also the case for conceptual analysis. I could give the following conceptual analysis of "knowledge": knowledge = unjustified false belief. Well, that would be a silly conceptual analysis of "knowledge". But this isn't an argument against doing conceptual analysis.
"Isn't that a strange thing for an error theorist to say?"
Not strange at all. I'm actually rather surprised to see you ask this question, given how often you extol the virtues of skepticism. Anyway, there are lots of situations in which discourse that presupposes a falsehood can be useful. For example, just consider all the false scientific theories that have been, and in some cases continue to be, powerful tools for predicting and controlling phenomena. Moral discourse is useful in different ways.
"People don't usually protest just to express their emotions. People go to protests because they want to draw attention to something in the world."
Yes. And the noncognitivist will say that you draw attention to it, in order to express emotions about it, or to express commands about it, or whatever. Expressing emotion about X and drawing attention to X are not mutually exclusive.
"If that's what the detector measures, then it certainly would make a difference to my moral judgements. If such a detector declared homosexuality to be bad, we'd obviously wonder if the detector is somehow malfunctioning because it would be bizarre for homosexuality to hurt people to an extent akin to murder, but we would not casually dismiss this detection because the consequences are so grave."
In the scenario I'm describing, the detector measures the moral properties of the action, but our beliefs about the non-moral properties, such as the pain, fear, loss, number of people injured, etc., do not change. So it turns out that certain behaviours are morally wrong, even though they don't cause any suffering. Given your commitment to moral naturalism, this is obviously incoherent from your point of view. I take it that your position would be that the suffering *just is* the negative moral value.
@@KaneB "Just consider all the false scientific theories that have been, and in some cases continue to be, powerful tools for predicting and controlling phenomena."
Is that the sort of usefulness that we get by making moral judgements? Do moral judgements help us predict or control something? What is meant when we say that moral judgements are useful?
"Expressing emotion about X and drawing attention to X are not mutually exclusive."
Yet the point of drawing attention to a thing is that we expect there are observable facts that people will see when their attention is drawn, and these observables are the point of the protest. At least it would be highly dubious to characterize protests as being primarily concerned with emotions while many protesters are surely concerned with facts. Protesters are often emotional and they often express their emotions, but they almost always want people to hear more than just "I'm angry about this." The general public would have no reason to care about that.
"So it turns out that certain behaviours are morally wrong, even though they don't cause any suffering."
We cannot have a detector without something to detect. The detector was presented as the best case scenario for moral realism, but it's not the best case scenario if the scenario also includes an assumption that moral realism is false and the morality detector is actually measuring nothing, but just wiggling a needle for no reason. If this is truly a best case scenario for moral realism, then we need to have something real in mind for the detector to measure, or at least be open to the possibility that morality might be something real like suffering.
"I take it that your position would be that the suffering just is the negative moral value."
That is a natural conclusion that seems to follow when we attempt to find the meaning of morality based on observing how people use moral language and avoiding conceptual engineering.
Convincing video. I need to think about it more but I might be convinced
I dig the hair
2:15 Moore
The negation of a statement expressing a moral judgment also expresses a moral judgment. According to error theory, both statements would be false. How can be a statement and its negation both be false? It only seems to work if there's a third possibility besides 'right' or 'wrong' for actions to be, e.g. 'all actions are whatever (i.e. neither right nor wrong)'. But the added nothion of 'whateverness' doesn't really bring anything to the table, so the more parsimonious theory is still non-cognitivism.
hair looks great m8
What's your take on fictionalism? Do you think it's better than the noncognitivist impasse of making concessions to realists?
right. I would have thought that giving to charity is meaningless rather then false.
Excellent video! Do you think it’s fair to say that all the special sciences in fact *need* their own error theories to function?
It's like hmm let just whip out my moral properties detector. beep beep beep aaaaand....I couldn't find any. D:
New haircut looks good!
But I can't help but remembering that a month ago in the dating video comments, Kane replied to Maclin Kastex that:
"I'm not offended, but I'm also not going to cut my hair. I mean, I do give some consideration to how I appear to others, but at the same time, I think a degree of authenticity is important as well."
My principles haven't changed. But I realized that I don't actually care that much about long hair anymore. So with that, there was no reason to keep it.
Nice!
13:00
You said that meaning is indeterminate, I suppose you are motivated by the Kripkenstein argument about meaning?
Thank you for mentioning your haircut and not commenting on it, I think it really helped to eliminate the elephant in the room
Nice to know your new look hasn't changed your incorrect views ;). In all serious, looking sharp man!
sources on conceptual engineering
I have a video on it. Look up "Kane B conceptual engineering"
@@KaneB Thanks bro greetings from Chile
20:30 It seems to me that your response that you don't care what the morality detector says, is itself a moral judgement. You've already decided, presuppositionally, that you don't care what the detector says. You're not being honestly agnostic and investigating, really. In other words, you actually aren't buying into the premise of the hypothetical, that it genuinely *is* detecting moral facts. If you Genuinely believed it did, you wouldn't say "I don't care". That's ridiculous. You would only say that if you were narrow minded, blinded by confirmation bias, or the like. It's almost as if you believe your own judgements can't be flawed or something. It's so strange. How can you not be curious whatsoever? Have you never watched a movie, thought it was great, then someone points out an obvious plothole you missed (a fact about the movie), and now you judge it as crap? This is what we're dealing with. Even if it's your own subjective judgements, they can still be "wrong" even in a subjective sense.
I want you to take this criticism seriously, you're not giving the hypothetical the weight it deserves, you're not actually imagining it being a moral fact detector.
To really hammer this home, imagine that we instead built a descriptive fact detector. We point it at the proposition "water is made of h2o molecules" and the arrows swings over to the "true" section. We point it at a proposition that says "The sun is a ball of ice" and it jumps to "false". We do this hundreds of times, neigh thousands of times, until there's no doubt in your mind that the detector is accurate. Of course some facts are boring, and others are exciting. Now suppose you're an admitted history nerd, much like you're a metaethics nerd. It is a topic you actually care about, and so you point the detector at a proposition about Socrates' death, say that he died of hemlock poisoning. And to your surprise, the detector jumps to "false". You cannot both believe the detector is accurate, whilst also denying the detector, saying that you just choose to believe he died of hemlock poisoning anyway. The ONLY way you can logically make this argument, is if you weren't convinced the detector was telling the truth. So please, take the hypothetical seriously and re-evaluate it.
"It seems to me that your response that you don't care what the morality detector says, is itself a moral judgement"
It's just a description of how I would react. It's a psychological fact about me. I'm not seeing how I'm making any moral judgment here.
"It's almost as if you believe your own judgements can't be flawed or something"
Well, my reaction to the hypothetical is that it seems like my moral judgments are not even attempting to describe reality. Which is why I initially took this hypothetical as a reason to favour noncognitivism.
"imagine that we instead built a descriptive fact detector"
Obviously my judgments would line up with the measurements of a descriptive fact detector. So I would respond differently in the case of a moral property detector and a non-moral property detector. That's the whole point of the thought experiment. Beliefs have a "mind to world" direction of fit: when we form a belief, we are trying to match what we take the facts to be. Moral judgments don't seem to be like this. Not for me, at least.
"You cannot both believe the detector is accurate, whilst also denying the detector, saying that you just choose to believe he died of hemlock poisoning anyway"
It's not that I would deny what the moral property detector says. If it says that e.g. slavery is good, then I would conclude that it's a fact that slavery is good. But it would make no difference practically. I would continue to object to slavery, I would continue to condemn people who engage in slavery, I would continue to praise people who try to eradicate it, etc. But there is something very strange about this situation. It seems like if I say, "X is morally good", while at the same time sincerely objecting to X, and trying to prevent others from doing X, then my statement isn't really expressing *moral* concepts, even though it uses moral language.
@@KaneB
"It's just a description of how I would react. It's a psychological fact about me. I'm not seeing how I'm making any moral judgment here."
This is the crux of the issue. I don't see how you could have studied philosophy, or ethics specifically, and come to this conclusion. There's a billion different moral theories out there, but I doubt any of them would reject the parallel that all moral claims are ultimately an expression of an individual's goals, and goals they think others should have. You can think of it as reframing the "what is good?" question into "what goals should I have?". I'm gonna use that framing from now on because it will make my point clearer.
If you think slavery is wrong, that's because you have some goal that you want to achieve, that you think slavery is in opposition to. It might be the goal of reducing harm, making sure no one is violating rules of consent, rights from god, whatever. You might say "No it's not a goal, it's just a feeling, an attitude or a stance I hold. Not a proposition about the world". But then I will simply implore you to think about what goal the feeling, attitude or stance you hold is serving, because it is going to be serving one, guaranteed.
You have basic intuitive goals that you ought to eat to day. You have trivial goals that you should probably go to sleep early, and so on. Now you might describe it as a mere psychological fact about you, that you think these things, but that's a cop-out. ALL goals you have are ultimately moral ones. And you can check this by asking questions such as "why do I want to fulfil this goal X? Oh right, because it is a step towards this moral goal Y"
Now we get to the concern I am raising. I'm telling you that there's this goal X (learning the morality detector's outputs) that I care about, which you also should care about. You don't get to simply say that you don't share the goal, and that's a psychological fact about you, rather than a moral judgement. You're free to say you don't care about it, but then just acknowledge the reason why, which goal has priority over caring about the detector. And if you can't answer that question, all I can say is, THINK HARDER.
What if i were to say it's just a psychological fact about me, that I don't care about slavery, and so therefore I'm not making a moral judgement on it? If I were to pass by a stranger in captivity, I would bear no responsibility towards helping the person escape, for I have no "moral judgements" or "goals" about whether slavery should exist or not. Would you accept such an answer? I doubt it. So be more consistent and demand the same of yourself. Treat yourself like you would a different person who holds a different view. You don't know if you have the right moral goals or not, much like you can never be certain if the reality you percieve is the true reality, merely an approximation, or wrong altogether. You have to be critical and reevaluate constantly. With this in mind, you cannot seriously tell me that if you came across a morality detector, that you earnestly believed could tell you right from wrong better than your own judgements could, that you wouldn't care what it says. It literally makes no sense to think so, unless you're lying and don't care about morality afterall.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter Well, I have studied philosophy. I've done a BA, MA, and am currently nearing the end of a PhD.
Anyway, it seems to me that you're completing missing the point of the hypothetical. (The penultimate sentence of your comment, for example, suggests that you're just not understanding what I'm saying.) Unfortunately, I can't be bothered to go the trouble of explaining this, at least not over text. I'd be happy to do it over voice chat, if you'd like.
@@KaneB I understand completely what you're saying, and I'm rejecting it. I repeat, it's a cop-out answer. Whatever property the detector is picking up, that property is the one your goal should be focused on. You DO NOT get to say you "don't care". To say that is to implicitly state your judgements supercede the detector, which they can't by definition if you believe the detector is describing a FACT about the world. Only way you can get out of it is by lying about your opinion of the detector's reliability. Which also defeats the purpose of the hypothetical. It really is that simple. Think. Harder. Let me know when you figure it out.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter You're not as smart as you think you are.
are you still looking for a date with that fresh new look huh?
I'm still interested in that, yeah.
Based.
I wish we would stop this trend.
@@jmike2039 The term 'Based' and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
@@jmike2039 saying based is based
@@viinisaari What have been the consequences of all the people writing "based"? Genuine question. I can't say that any (specific, unique) consequences occur to me.
Nooo, te cortaste el cabello! :( Pero igual te ves lindo :)
I think suffering is bad. Specifically extreme, avoidable, unnecessary suffering is bad.
I don't think skepticism about the badness of suffering is practical or even interesting. Moral values, and epistemic values as well, are subjective. It's a shame but that's the world we live in. We do the best we can with what we've got, even if it's absurd.
Nice shirt. It makes you seem like a slightly different person...
Who is this cutie oh my
oh my god
and few months later you will become a moral realist
Good luck finding a lady my friend. You seem to be a nice guy.