A Million Save Two Utils-Ten Thousand Lose A Hundred
I think in such a circumstance pure utilitarianism breaks down. You shouldn't just multiply and thus come to the conclusion that the first option is better. Not once the downside to one group is very high versus very low to the other. The problem of course arises if the decision is arrived at via people's votes. Once the downside to those harmed reaches a certain point, adding more people who will very slightly benefit from that downside should not swing the decision. The problem, of course is that if the decision depends on people's votes, the wrong side will win unless half of the people who stand to gain a little, vote against their "interests". They often do do that, either because they evaluated the situation incorrectly, they were lied to by experts who persuaded them that the other side was better for them, they already had more than enough utils so it was no big deal to be magnanimous (eg celebrities) or they simply wanted to be nice.
But often less than half vote this way, especially if the small group who are hurt are people they don't like. Yet another problem with "democracy". "One person, one vote" sounds nice. But is it really a good thing if a voter who very slightly prefers x completely negates a voter (or someone who can't vote) who desperately needs NOT x?
It's a foundational set of principles though. The attempt to make it one is clearly flawed. We understand it's wrong to kill an innocent person to use a few organs to save some others - those atempting to say it's good because of some founding principle of utilitarianism are clearly missing too much about morality
The problem isn't a difference between utilitarians (although that's a very real problem). it's that it's ignored something that is fundamentally part of human morality. It's one of the
I mean in the sense that I'm not sure all foundationally normative propositions can be reduced down to a single proposition I would agree. But I don't take utilitarianism to be reducibly to a single proposition. Generally there are multiple propositions we would have to agree to before we can really define utilitarianism. The first one is the idea that we could even measure amounts of util, pleasure, pain, wellbeing, etc such that we would be able to weigh which decision leaves us with more or less of them.
I think that very few people identify as the label of utilitarian because we found better things to measure, or at least people prefer other measurements more. But I wouldn't say that consequentialism itself is completely dismissed. There are probably many moral philosophers that identify as consequentialists. One of the reasons someone might prefer consequentialism is that it grounds morality in something that can be measured rather than abstract notions of good or bad.
And the inherent problem with intuitions is that they are not shared across moral evaluators, so people probably don't like using intuition since they tend to contradict each other.
There's a big difference between morality and sociopolitical ethics. A lot of people don't really understand that morality isn't a rational concept. Our deeply felt moral intuitions are just that. We sense them. They come from our emotional responses to subjective experiences, and they vary in both individuals and cultures. We can use guiding principles and rationality to set up a functioning society, but the foundation itself is nonrational, and there's no way of creating a flawless ethical sys
Good work. Moral progress is more art than science.
Moral progress is more art than science means what exactly? In my view moral progress is just society being closer to the way you want it to be. ItÂ’s neither art nor science.
Social / societal morality is mainly for children (and women); it hits a ceiling pretty quickly for ambitious males.
As long as your society isn’t tyrannical, then your morality should become more individual / internal / intuitive. You always keep one foot in the social, or at least manage it from afar, but there is no progress to be had there, relatively speaking.
As you progress, morality becomes less rational and more intuitive because it’s a treasure hunt in an unknown land, and rationality cannot lead in the unknown.
Social / societal morality is mainly for children (and women); it hits a ceiling pretty quickly for ambitious males.
As long as your society isn’t tyrannical, then your morality should become more individual / internal / intuitive. You always keep one foot in the social, or at least manage it from afar, but there is no progress to be had there, relatively speaking.
As you progress, morality becomes less rational and more intuitive because it’s a treasure hunt in an unknown land, and rationality ca
I guess your conception of morality is a bunch of powerful men reflecting on how irrational morality really is while women and children try to make sure society doesn’t harm them too much? 😉
For real though, if you are talking about your internal sense of morality then the only real starting point is that after your contemplation of all the attitudes you have to strive for what you personally prefer/define as the good. Not having that starting point is a bit like hunting for treasure without a map, to use your metaphor.
Individuals experience moral progress in their own lives. From a societal view, it seems that moral progress happens the closer a population gets to a widely agreed upon set of values, but even when you have government built on that kind of strong cultural foundation—because humans are both fallible and complicated; some will abandon it, some will corrupt it, and others will transcend it—ultimately, through its many stages, it will fall apart. If the concept of moral progress means anything at the social level, it's cohesion. The problem is that individual morality is inevitably at odds with that.
I guess your conception of morality is a bunch of powerful men reflecting on how irrational morality really is while women and children try to make sure society doesnÂ’t harm them too much? 😉
For real though, if you are talking about your internal sense of morality then the only real starting point is that after your contemplation of all the attitudes you have to strive for what you personally prefer/define as the good. Not having that starting point is a bit like hunting for treasure with
My morality is the great man preparing the way to the promised land and then returning back to society to bring those who were left behind. It’s a progression though.
You strive for the good, but you make sure it extends beyond the practical good. If you stop dreaming and reaching for the good beyond the practical, then you have exited the moral progress game.
Individuals experience moral progress in their own lives. From a societal view, it seems that moral progress happens the closer a population gets to a widely agreed upon set of values, but even when you have government built on that kind of strong cultural foundation—because humans are both fallible and complicated; some will abandon it, some will corrupt it, and others will transcend it—ultimately, through its many stages, it will fall apart. If the concept of moral progress means anything at t
Why do you use progress instead of change, as if change was inherently positive as a trend?
Personally i have a very materialistic (marxian if you will) view of social morality. Social morality, ie the set of behavioural rules that members of a society are expected to follow, at the equilibrium is based on stuff that works for that society economic condition.
In an agrarian society where the unit of production is the family you will end up with different moral rules than those ruling over Imperial Rome urban population ok? if some animal is often connected with diseases (either it's farming or the places he lives in) and/or with societal disruption eating it will be banned as a moral rule because it makes sense, except when conditions that justified the banning disappear, it can stay as a moral rule anyway for a long while.
Same for sexual morality. Birth control changes approx everything about the actual practical effects of infidelity yet morals have to catch up with it and it can take a while.
It's not that "old morality" was wrong, it was very probably reasonable pre birth control, with the family as the unit of economic production.
Biological pulsions underpin all of this but when you have a very wide range of moral rules for those things depending on the place and time in history, you know it's not biological (unlike say, men being those that fight in wars).
There are some pacific islands (and some amazonian tribes as well iirc) where they have tribe-wide orgies occasionally, then children pop up and everyone is vaguely related so they all raise them without fathers being known, to the point the "official" father (or fathers) are the brothers of the mother.
Evidently in those cultures the family isn't the unit of production (a piece of land isn't assigned to an enlarged family to produce enough to sustain it through the work of family members). The tribe is in a larger area of land (or water access for fishing) so it all works out.
Now society has been through many significant changes in production organization in the last 200 years which fully explains current and recent past moral confusion. We aren't stable enough for enough time to develop proper morals for the current societal production arrangements. That justifies change , but it's not like all change is for the best.
And most crucially there wouldn't be change in moral norms if the economic structure stayed the same. Egyptian morality didn't change much if at all since unification.
It's like punctuated equilibria in evolution. You don't have a fixed rate of change, you have big changes when the environment changes until you find a balance that stays there until exogenous elements change requiring a new equilibrium to be found.
And you judge a morality on it's outcomes (like everything else). Does it work to allow society to exist , prosper, flourish, in current environmental conditions?
If you want to play meta-morality you need consequentialism.
Or you give up trying to play populus, take a moral set of rules that you feel fine with, and give up on Kantian attempts to generalize it to everyone and so on.
I mean, much as I like disagreeing with Luciom, a lot of that kinda makes sense to me.
Why do you use progress instead of change, as if change was inherently positive as a trend?
I don't disagree. “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.”
My point was that societies seem to flourish when their populations have more shared values, and in a divided country, a movement towards that could be seen as moral progress given moral beliefs underlie those values.
"Same for sexual morality. Birth control changes approx everything about the actual practical effects of infidelity yet morals have to catch up with it and it can take a while.
It's not that "old morality" was wrong, it was very probably reasonable pre birth control, with the family as the unit of economic production.
Everything? Is the family unit no more valuable than its contribution to economic production? Does it not also have to do with love, responsibility, child development, emotional support, etc?
I don't disagree. “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.”
My point was that societies seem to flourish when their populations have more shared values, and in a divided country, a movement towards that could be seen as moral progress given moral beliefs underlie those values.
Everything? Is the family unit no more valuable than its contribution to economic production? Does it not also have to do with love, responsibility, child development, emotional support, etc?
everything about the effects of infidelity.
in fact you have stable and healthy situations ongoing now where families have nothing to do with the sanctity of heterosexual monogamous marriage.
you can have love and everything else even if the biological parents **** around
Seems totally wrong to me. A fascist society might flourish. I dont think being expected to follow it, helping it florish etc becomes moral. Defying it might well be.
How are you guys measuring moral outcomes? How are you defining flourish?
I use quality of life across time for you and your loved ones.
If you’re serious about morality, then you need to be constantly self auditing and you need to be ruthlessly honest about your actual quality of life vs what is possible.
for society morals? some version of the human development index (which is strongly correlated to GDP but corrects for the rare cases of high GDP - shitty conditions otherwise, that can happen sometimes).
That , + demographic trends (which aren't captured by HDIs as far as i know) given you want something to continue potentially for indefinite time.
So like the current demographic crisis is basically a severe indictment of current societal morality (in some places much more than in others of course). Like a death sentence, alone it is the proof current social morality is completly bankrupt and incompatible with long term success of society.
Keep in mind with that i don't mean specific elements of it, because we aren't sure what causes the drop in fertility so much under 2. But whatever the causes are, that makes the set of rules we play by incompatible with human prosperity in the long term.
We can be *absolutely sure* something significant in our morals is *worse than it ever was in human history* for that especially crucial element, fertility.
Seems totally wrong to me. A fascist society might flourish. I dont think being expected to follow it, helping it florish etc becomes moral. Defying it might well be.
Depending on how you define fascist it might work yes, which by itself proves it is not as bad to have a fascist society than other societies that fail much worse than that.
But that's with recent past / present economic condition remember.
One element of ur-fascism that is plausibly very bad for an important pillar of societal morals (ie incentivizing risk taking and research and creativity, because you want gdp per capita to grow at the frontier, not only in the catch-up-with-others phase) makes it implausible that it is better than liberal democracy.
And China is showing us that, it is stagnating with difficulty now at the middle-income trap (+ it also shares with us the fertility problem, but at lower per capita gdp, which makes it a lot worse).
But yes it is just a cope to call fascism "the worst thing ever" , especially as typically defined by the left. It is very very very very very very far from being the worst thing ever.
If you want to play meta-morality you need consequentialism.
Or you give up trying to play populus, take a moral set of rules that you feel fine with, and give up on Kantian attempts to generalize it to everyone and so on.
Consequentialism is not meta-morality, it’s normative morality.
Also I don’t necessarily disagree or agree with your account of social morality, it just seems trivial. Like we’re standing outside of morality trying to describe how it came about and we point to this that or the other event in history that caused people to act certain ways.
I think most people are more interested in their own personal conception of morality rather than how society views it or what society prescribes to us.
for society morals? some version of the human development index (which is strongly correlated to GDP but corrects for the rare cases of high GDP - shitty conditions otherwise, that can happen sometimes).
That , + demographic trends (which aren't captured by HDIs as far as i know) given you want something to continue potentially for indefinite time.
So like the current demographic crisis is basically a severe indictment of current societal morality (in some places much more than in others of course
I agree there are huge concerns at the collective level. These issues are complex. Several of our collective threats are existential in nature, which means they are not to be managed and must be fully solved.
What is the appropriate response for an individual in this situation?
My claim: the proper response is to identify with the hero, which means make yourself responsible, and individualize the moral struggle with the hope that what is discovered will apply to our collective moral struggle.
It turns out this works. It’s actually the only solution.
Consequentialism is not meta-morality, it’s normative morality.
Also I don’t necessarily disagree or agree with your account of social morality, it just seems trivial. Like we’re standing outside of morality trying to describe how it came about and we point to this that or the other event in history that caused people to act certain ways.
I think most people are more interested in their own personal conception of morality rather than how society views it or what society prescribes to us.
no with meta-morality i mean "which set of moral rules is good and why".
It's not trivial to understand that agricultural morality made sense then and not now for specific pragmatic reasons. I think many people think their own morals should be adopted by everyone else and everything would be better if they did (Kant style). I don't personally.
If you want to have your own private language that is incomprehensible to other people go ahead but I don’t find it useful.
It's not trivial to understand that agricultural morality made sense then and not now for specific pragmatic reasons. I think many people think their own morals should be adopted by everyone else and everything would be better if they did (Kant style). I don't personally.
I think that any way you slice it thinking other people should follow your morality is the only thing that makes sense. You might not want to force them to follow it, but if you truly don’t prefer your morality why hold to it in the first place? It’s a performative contradiction.
If you want to have your own private language that is incomprehensible to other people go ahead but I don’t find it useful.
I think that any way you slice it thinking other people should follow your morality is the only thing that makes sense. You might not want to force them to follow it, but if you truly don’t prefer your morality why hold to it in the first place? It’s a performative contradiction.
uh? i prefer my morality for me because i live better following it and i don't necessarily live better if others follow it because there are selfish aspects in my morality. How is it hard to follow?
Like "never gamble at -ev" is an important moral rule for me. I need others to bet with me at -ev for themselves though.
Save prudently, a lot in good times, invest reasonably, build generational wealth that frees myself and heirs from work if they want to if you can, is a moral aspiration for me.
It's impossible for all people to achieve that though, so the fewer competitors i have the better. I mean i want house help to be as cheap as possible ok? there would be no house help if everyone followed my morality, which is about learning high earning skills and so on as well.
Minimize effort required for the goal you have is another moral rule for me. Try to genralize that and you end with no nurses and many other necessary jobs.
In general a philosophy where you "insist" your children becomes doctor and the like, any philosophy where your family moral worth is linked to status and success in life in relative and not only absolute terms, and plenty of moral philosophies are like that, can't be generalized to the whole population.
In general "try to find the best price/quality ratios for the stuff you buy to enjoy life as much as possible" is a moral rule for me as well. If other people follow it and they are similar to me in preferences i am ****ed , see the many tourist places that get destroyed when the masses discover them, but for quality niche artisanal cheeses, wines and so on which aren't "on the map" yet.
Should i go on? my personal morals are based on achieving the best i can for me and my family, and that means winning 0 sum games in society, the hell i want everyone to share that mindset.
I am super happy with people existing that sacrifice for others and so on, or that "have fun" in betting at -ev and the like. Especially as long as they don't violently ask to take my stuff (and many don't).
You know the hawks and doves game? i want to be an hawk when almost everyone else is a dove.
Seems totally wrong to me. A fascist society might flourish. I dont think being expected to follow it, helping it florish etc becomes moral. Defying it might well be.
I don't necessarily disagree, but when I think of flourishing, the healthy and lush aspects of the definition are paramount. There's that Marie-Louise von Franz quote about how it's only when manipulators of public opinion use commercial pressure and violence that they seem to achieve temporary success, but this causes mass repression. Since mass repression causes the same kind of neurotic disassociation as individual repression and is opposed to our moral instincts, it will fail. In a fascist society, many will play along out of fear or self-interest, not because they share its values, and some who support the system may be going through denial. In my opinion, economic development under tyrannical order isn't "flourishing."
They can analyze things as much as they want, but if they have different logical starting points based on what they subjectively value, they'll never agree.
In those cases, they will at least be much more likely to realize that the basis of all or part their disagreement is in fact stemming from a subjective starting point as opposed to some error being made when traveling from the starting point to the end point. As of now 95% of debates make little or no effort to do this.
In those cases, they will at least be much more likely to realize that the basis of all or part their disagreement is in fact stemming from a subjective starting point as opposed to some error being made when traveling from the starting point to the end point. As of now 95% of debates make little or no effort to do this.
We used to do this more in the old days.
Another very big cause of disgreements among reasonable people are semantic. The very prolonged atheism, agnosticisms debates in SMP for example. I once had a very long frustrating argument with someone elsewhere about beliefs. Turned out we were saying the same thing but meant something different by 'believe P'.
Understanding each other is hard cooperative work. One of my long standign critcisms of politcs is that people are trying much harder to misunderstand each other than to understand. Understanding was even seen as a bad thing.
