The philosophy thread general discussion

@Best Of:

I'm not sure what kind of religious people you have met, but I was never taught to justify an action of mine by saying those sorts of things.

That being said, Jesus beat you to it on the 'do unto others' bit by nearly 2000 years. Also, Jesus justified saving someone's life even when the religious background he was raised in said not to interact with people from different backgrounds or beliefs (the whole good Samaritan thing).

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Only mathematical science? What about sociology or psychology (especially social psychology)? Or are you merely talking about the M in STEM?

edited 12th Dec '16 1:57:48 AM by Quag15

Yes. In order for psychological study to be appropriate to learn about ethics, ethics must be contained in the mind.

I can tell you a thing or two about things that exist only in the mind. But if ethics is one of them, then I think we should just give up. There is no great value in studying figments of the imagination.

This is covered by the greater challenge. Point to where in the physical universe ethics is. Give us space time coordinates. If you can find them, then ethics can be empirically studied. Social studies are a subset of empirical studies that focus on the humans of earth.

Psychological studies can have bearing on ethical problems. But you cannot find ethics itself in the mind, so you can not study ethics using psychology.

If you argue that ethics is partially in the mind, I would ask you which part?

Despite the almost uncontrolled inflation of many of my posts, I actually do try to be terse when I feel the possibility presents itself with little chance of misunderstanding (that I can spot before I'm done writing). "God said so" was an effort to summarise all moral instructions that are justified on the basis of doctrine and/or personal revelation.

The point I was making was that even if you feel that God really did dictate a moral instruction to you, the only way it's useful to those who don't have access to your revelation is if you can justify said instruction without relying on the authority you might feel that revelation should carry. "Society requires a basic level of respect for others, including their property; so don't steal it" is more universally acceptable than "I read in a God book that God says you're not to steal" (or "God told me personally that stealing is not OK".)

Any religious philosopher of ethics, if they wanted to convince someone like me, would need to satisfy this requirement for non-faith-based argument. If they can do it, I'll agree that their moral instruction is based on sound reasoning (obviously, barring any errors I can notice). (Of course, I might say that it was always possible to get that instruction without the faith bit to begin with, but that's a side note.)

I knew I was quoting the Jesus version of the Golden Rule, but it's not actually his idea to begin with. First, it's much too universal a sentiment to plausibly have a known author.

Second, it's inconceivable that we could have had civilisation up to the time Jesus allegedly lived without having that rule. (Even in nonreligious families, notions of fairness you hear from very little children who can barely form sentences at all start from an expectation of equal treatment. You'll notice it if you pay attention, as I was forced to when I was growing up with altogether too many younger siblings. It's always "X has something, so I should also get it" or "how come X can do something when I can't?". The reverse, "why should I be allowed X when you're not?" is just a very basic alternative wording for the same sentiment, from the other perspective.)

Third, there are actually surviving texts from China and Egypt that have the same idea, and largely the same wording, as "do unto others" that precede Jesus by hundreds of years. It is very unlikely that these ideas were somehow groundbreaking when they were written down in those cultures. They're much more likely to just be things that everyone knows, written down as steps to making some other point.

Just for example, from Wikipedia, two ~500 BC examples from China:

I had actually rather hoped that I wouldn't need to elaborate on that bit even if I didn't point out that I was quoting Jesus only for convenience. I suppose this sort of validates my habit of trying to predict the most likely responses and sort of pre-reply to them.

To address this from the perspective of what I said in my previous post, anyone using this anecdote as an argument for saving lives would need to also be able to make the argument without reference to the supernatural aspects of Jesus. As it happens, in this case it is trivially easy, as the story doesn't (IIRC, at least) rely on any supernatural revelation or anything.

If you can't make your case about a moral principle without referring to the supernatural, I will find it very difficult to take your argument seriously because there will be a huge axiomatic assumption at the foundation of it. (That assumption, obviously, being the supernatural.)

As it happens, most moral doctrines that we hear from religions can (and do) also exist in the absence of those, or any, religions because they can be formulated and propagated and observed without any need for a supernatural element.

If the religion helps people to understand and get access to those points, fine. That's the same benefit you get from folk tales and fairy tales that have a moral lesson imbedded.

EDIT: Actually, once more about the Golden Rule: one thing I have found very annoying when I've watched/listened to debates between advocates of various religions and atheists is the way the religious always want to claim the Golden Rule for themselves. Whether it's a Hindu, Jew, Christian, or Muslim, there's always the effort to claim that we wouldn't have the Golden Rule if it wasn't for their faith.

Judaism and Hinduism, in particular, include, in their traditions, anecdotes about people who are asked to define their religion as briefly as possible replying with essentially the Golden Rule, claiming it's the most fundamental aspect of their faith. Presumably they think the person they're responding to wouldn't already have the Golden Rule from their culture and moral system, which is ludicrous and, frankly, offensive.

The Golden Rule is such a basic thing, and so fundamental to all societies, that any culture or tradition trying to claim it for itself would be offensive. It would be like trying to take credit for the idea of cooking ingredients before eating them.

For another side note on this, it's interesting that many of the most ancient formulations of it (especially in ancient Greece around the same time as the Chinese versions I quoted above) say it in the negative. Rather than "do unto others what you would have them do unto you", it's

and

My hunch is that when those were said/written, the philosophers in question were trying to avoid special cases of the positive formulation. If it's "do unto others", you get the obvious response of "What if I like something that others hate? Should I still do it?". The answer, equally obvious, is that you're to take the instruction as more general. If you like it when people do things they know you like, do to them what you know they like. Still, you avoid that digression by formulating it in the negative: "don't do what you wouldn't have them do to you". It's simpler and fairly easy to convert to the positive.

edited 12th Dec '16 2:57:57 AM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Um... You kind of need ethics even in physics and chemistry. Mainly because it's a good idea to ask questions like "is this a good idea?" or "where is the Hague, again?" before you run the calculations that'll smack a missile with a sarin gas payload into a civilian population.

edited 12th Dec '16 3:01:31 AM by Euodiachloris

Well, the 'Never impose' bit is a negative way (notice the use of 'never'). Jesus' saying is a positive way (the former is a path that doesn't lead to human action, while the latter leads to a more active human effort. Even if the core ideas are there, I think Jesus' formulation of the rule is more perfect than the Chinese example (and even more so because Jesus' background is not a Chinese one, but a Jewish one, so, there are different cultural and philosophical contexts which make the ideas similar on the surface, but ultimately different in its implications).

What if they discriminate someone I'm close friends with, even if they do other things I like other than taking a stance against discrimination?

The thing about 'do unto others' is that ideally one should do it, even if people disapprove of it (Jesus puts a lot of emphasis on personal sacrifice for the sake of someone else - something which wasn't the case in Chinese culture, which subsumed the personal into the collective and didn't allowed for a greater level of empathy (it allowed some, but not too much to the point of subverting the social and political status quo and expectations of the times); Jesus elaborated a more complex interplay of the personal in relation to the collective(s) or to the communities (both one's own community as well as other communities close to one's own).

Because they want to validate their beliefs in the eyes of general society (especially considering the social stigma religion has been on the receiving end in Europe and some parts of the US)? It's basic social nature to defend one's faith (or one's political ideology, or even one's local community, for that matter, both on the left and on the right) above and beyond the necessary bits.

But then again, I find those defenses appealing and interesting (discussion or debate-wise), not annoying.

edited 12th Dec '16 3:26:12 AM by Quag15

Um, Is this a good idea questions: Is this experiment ethical? A question of ethics, not a question of physics.

Also, We can't afford to miss questions: Ignoring the unresolved question as to whether warfare is justifiable. This is a "How many safeties should I add to the code of this aeroplane guidance system" question. A question of ethics, not a question of computer science.

So no, ethics is completely irrelevant to the study of physics. Only to the practise of the study of physics.

Which is still the study of physics. Believe it or not, you still need basic safety standards to do physics... because the people doing even the hardest of hard science studies... are people. Even should AI get to the point of designing and running experiments, they'll still need procedures and network protocols which, at the basic level... are the realm of ethics.

Where you get groups of people, human or AI, it's a good idea to have codes of conduct, if only so nobody is taken by surprise by a random industrial laser beam when walking or wheeling through a door.

Ethics is relevant to physics the same way it is relevant to farming and waste disposal. It is part of the job, not part of the subject matter. You can screw up morally as a physicist, farmer, or waste disposal technician. But no one says you can learn ethics by becoming a farmer or waste disposal technician. So how do you learn ethics by studying physics?

I mean, beyond reading the safety leaflet they hand out on day one of on the job training.

Which sort of brings us to the elephant in the room; How do you choose which axioms to use in the first place?

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

Axioms are, by definition, somewhat arbitrary. One's choice of them is at the heart of philosophical debates of all sorts. If one person starts from the axiom "life is sacred" and another "life is disposable", they are unlikely to be able to have a meaningful conversation about much of anything. Now, it may be that those are not actually axioms, but rather derived from some deeper axiom that both share.

edited 12th Dec '16 6:25:35 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Case by case. You can compliment someone on keeping a safe distance to the car ahead of them in traffic while also commenting on how unsafe it is to drive without the seat belt on.

I'm not sure if you noticed that I did address this in an edited bit of my post. Basically, by formulating it in the negative (like the Greek examples I used) you avoid a tangent about the special cases of the positive, while still implying the positive. (I hope it's clear enough why the negative implies the positive that I don't have to explain it.)

Of course, the Jewish version that precedes Jesus is "love your neighbour as yourself". From other conversations about interpretations of Jewish scriptures I've got the impression that "neighbour" is often taken as referring exclusively to other Jews, but that's probably debatable. In any case, that's roughly the same as what Jesus said, albeit worded less specifically.

In India, and again preceding Jesus, you have "treat others as you treat yourself". That's almost word for word the same as Jesus.

One of my Chinese examples, from Laozi, was this:

I think that's a very good and sophisticated formulation, except for the potential exclusivity of the word "neighbour".

Alright, but whenever I hear the "our religion gives us the Golden Rule" bit I think I might reply with something like:

"In Finland, we've got this unique and original idea called 'presumption of innocence'. I know you're not familiar with this because it's a Finnish thing, but basically, it means that if you're accused of something, you will be treated as innocent until an investigation and trial are concluded and they prove that you were guilty. If they don't prove that, you're declared innocent. Isn't that a wonderful idea that we Finns invented?"

The Golden Rule is such a fundamental and intuitive part of humanity, because we're an empathetic species, that the people who wrote the first discussions about it that were preserved to our time were almost certainly never even trying to present themselves as the originators of that idea. Claiming that you get the Golden Rule from a particular philosopher or religion or culture is like claiming that the idea of telling stories for entertainment was actually invented by the ancient Greeks or Socrates or the cult of Apollo. The claim is ridiculous on face value, and the more you think about it the more annoying it becomes.

If you say that the Greeks developed particular styles or ideas about storytelling, fine. They sure did, and it's great. Just don't claim they invented the concept of storytelling, and don't claim that a particular prophet or religion gave you the Golden Rule. (Again, if someone's come up with a particularly good variation or formulation of it - Kant, for instance, although the Categorical Imperative is not quite the same - give them credit. Just don't claim the entire concept is original.)

There's probably some truth to this, especially regarding Islam, but even then most religion-related discrimination and bigotry in the West still comes from the powerful majority, and is aimed at other religions and the non-religious. The very fact that people go on stage to debate atheists and say "without our religion you wouldn't know killing is wrong" is very telling. They're so privileged that they actually believe that, and their social position is so strong that they expect to get away with a statement like that. They're respected academics and bishops and so on, yet they're no better than a Youtube atheist ranting about religious people having no morals because they only do good because they believe in an eternal reward/punishment system.

Just to go back to my example about the unique Finnish idea of presumption of innocence, how do you think American or British or German people would react if I went on stage to talk about Finnish culture and gave that little speech? Don't you think they might be offended at my ignorance about preceding ideas about presumption of innocence, and at my obvious arrogance in falsely appropriating it as an originally Finnish concept?

edited 12th Dec '16 6:47:58 AM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

There are a few basic rules of axiom selection. First, no consistent theory contains a pair of deductions that contradict themselves. Second, you probably won't be selecting axioms about, say, arithmetic, when you are selecting a moral theory.

That's it for the rules off the top of my head. But I do know one major guideline. You try to fit the theory to the evidence. Ethics may not exist itself in the physical world, but it has consequences in the physical world. These consequences make up a set of empirical evidence.

For something like gravity, you run through theories, then throw out the ones that do not fit the evidence. Same with ethics. If you selected a theory that does not match the evidence, you throw it out. Except unlike gravity, ethics is not in the physical universe. It is like numbers. They are evidenced in the physical universe, but not located within.

edited 12th Dec '16 7:00:22 AM by war877

4174 De Marquis11th

Again it is possible to argue about that stuff. And morality isn't just game theoretic strategy.

4177 war877

First would probability theory be pointless in a deterministic unverse? Would it be just as fine for me to say that "I have a 50 percent chance of winning the lottery" as saying "I have a one in a million chance"?

For the most part probability is about our uncertainty, and isn't an objective fact solely about the thing it's self. There are still better or worst ways of handling it. And "I want it to be this" and I think it's this end of story" are not valid. Morality could be a similar objective subjective.

And of course these processes in your brain are going to be what picks whatever external standard you go with. If the objective morality asserts x, what's to keep you from deciding "Okay I care more about (insert your previous values) more than morality? Even something like it would create an efficient society is judging it with something already in your head.

edited 12th Dec '16 7:31:51 AM by supermerlin100

Probability theory is not about non-determinism. It is about prediction.

I am going to assume you are talking about the window dressing. The way in which a theory is explained to people does not make up part of the theory itself. So, although we say a six sided die has a one sixth chance of coming up six. What we mean to say is that if we predict that the die comes up six, we'd be right about one sixth of the time asymptotically. This is not an imaginary thing in a deterministic universe.

Your claim about subjective morality there looks completely true to me. In fact it happens all the time. Criminals routinely denounce standards of morality external to them in favour of their own internal value system. The results are usually detrimental to society.

Although I may have misunderstood your point?

@ Fighteer: The article that DeMarquis linked to asks a set of ethical questions, and claims that science can't answer them. I agree, because I don't think that those questions have (objective) answers in the first place, but whenever I hear someone claim that "science can't answer this or that" there's almost always an implication of "but this other thing totally can!" The reason I'm asking about how axioms should be chosen is too see if that's true in this case as well.

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

@war877

Okay right there we are already having a problem. My point is probability has no place in the universe to exist, without minds. And the probabilities we give are functions of our knowledge and not simply of external events themselves. As far as nature is concerned something is either true or not (baysian probability), or will happen or not. People with different information will correctly give different odds, but they can't just give whatever odds.

As for morality, I was think more along the lines, that the objective morality turns out to be e.g. piling pebbles into large prime numbered heaps, with no connection with our values other then a notion that we should follow some cosmic principle. To be clear it's not that we're missing the connection, it just isn't logically there. Where as I would assume that a lot of moral disagreement involves someone "missing" something. Like people might believe the fact that refuges are people, but when they imagine the situation, I'm not sure that most people are thinking of them like that. I'd imagine most of them would be uncomfortable putting numbers to the priority of American lives (great enough to justify the decision), while agreeing that there has to be a point where the risk/cost to us is small enough.

Meanwhile even if humans are all talking about the same thing, there can always be intractibly difficult problems, that would produce disagreements. And aliens certainly wouldn't be talking about the same thing, even if they have a certain about of overlap.

I agree that probability theory is not a physical universe thing. But this makes sense, since you study it using mathematical science, not natural science. But, still it is not entirely within the mind. It is not imaginary. It has real world consequences.

So my question would be, can two different universes have a different value for the mathematical constant PI? And followup question, can two different universes have different fundamental objective moralities? And if you assert that there is no fundamental objective morality for this universe, can any universe have one?

I am talking mainly to your use of the phrase some cosmic principle. As I assert that morality is mathematical in nature, I do not believe that we can simply look at the universe and see its cosmic principle for morality. Mathematical stuff is not limited in scope to a single universe.

What possible physical property of the universe could cause this principle to come into existence? If there is none, did a god put it there?

Yeah, most ethical arguments are of that nature.

Intractable problems also have a solution in morality. And not the impossible solution it first looks like. There comes a point, where the cost of doing further calculations becomes prohibitive. When this point is met, the correct solution is the best one found so far.

Q-sorts — how to study subjective opinion and belief objectively.

Just saying. :/

@war877

Well what is the shared meaning of pi? If they mean the ratio of circumfernce to diameter, I don't think there is a non-euclidean geometry with a fixed ratio.

[[quteblock]]And followup question, can two different universes have different fundamental objective moralities?[[/quoteblock]] I don't think ethical systems (for lack of a better phrase) are universe dependent. Like aliens would probably consider morality a human thing.

I guess that's a way of putting it. That a followly realize morality would ontologically just be a catagorization system. But we have reasons to care.

I feel like we've had this debate over and over.

While it is possible that morality exists as some kind of fundamental universal constant, nothing in our scientific inquiry thus far has provided any evidence, nor even the slightest hint, of it. To suggest, therefore, that it has anything to do with universal laws of any sort is a bit presumptuous.

"What color do you think the curtains on the Sun are?" "As you have yet to provide any credible reason to believe that the Sun has curtains, your question lacks a certain amount of cogency." "What about a hypothetical reality in which the Sun has curtains?" "I know a great psychologist you can see to help you with that problem."

Assigning morality to the universe is an is-ought fallacy. It takes the existence of something (the "is") and uses it to speculate about desirable or intended states or outcomes (the "ought").

edited 12th Dec '16 1:25:47 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

That really doesn't feel like what we're talking about. Like is anyone in this forum claiming that?

edited 12th Dec '16 1:36:30 PM by supermerlin100

I hope not.

Look, people are weird. Our hardware and software have rules, but the software is probably buggy, there are a few variants when it comes to HomoOS that are unmarked on the chassis and we lost the manuals, if they were ever printed.

Welcome to the soft sciences: dealing with a mess of borked feedback loops, be it microbiology or sociology.

The universal laws, if they exist, probably have several states: micro and macro. And, they behave differently when you try looking. Doesn't mean you can't look, or chip away at finding what the microscale laws are and how they scale up.

Ethics is one of those scaled up things where a single cell finds it a good idea to work in a group. Lots of negotiation and give-and-take. Think "biological Hobbes, just add chemistry for communication and transaction". Universal laws? There are just so many implications and iterations to the basic "find a way to survive until next week", it's staggering.

edited 12th Dec '16 2:01:30 PM by Euodiachloris

... Y'know, I just realized if your ethical code contained rules for basic arithmetic, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem would apply and your code would either be incomplete or inconsistent.

Some time ago I realized any kind of "universal theory" that "explained everything" (physically, not metaphysically) would likely require mathematics to do so, and thus would have rules for elementary arithmetic. Therefore, it'd be either incomplete or inconsistent by Gödel's Theorem.

Prepare to get your mind blown then. I perceive ethics as an optimisation function over the outcomes of decisions. Where we control the decisions, and the goal is the best overall outcome.

This presupposes functional math, set theory, counting, and ordering. So my theory for ethics contains the piano axioms implicitly in its assumptions. Therefore, ethics is either incomplete or inconsistent.

Utilitarianism doesn't necessarily any problems that are unresolvable, or at least not any that wouldn't be intractably complicated anyways.