[deleted] t1_jbfmpgh wrote
I am highly sympathetic to disquotationalism/deflationism/etc, but something sticks in my craw (intuitively repugnant).
Blackburn seems to say that there is no foundation (aside from justification) that "grounds" morality, and that maybe (I'm inferring now) morality is a name we give teleologically to our already normalized position within an ostensible ethical framework. In this way, we should do what we have always done: not get ourselves excommunicated or exiled by perversions, or activism or some such.
But it seems like we have a sense that moral activism *would-have-been-*right so many times, and times when it is not the sociocultural norm.
Rorty addresses this I think to the effect of, we are always wrong with respect to future normalized positions, but maybe this is too dismissive.
Can moral truth be that normalizing force? Is this just semantic? How can we account for heroic activism that runs very much against utility?
GingerJacob36 t1_jbg9xta wrote
Can you explain how activism runs against utility? It seems like it could be very much in line, as it is aimed towards the greatest good, at least in the mind of the activist.
[deleted] t1_jbgcjel wrote
I guess utility is a complex idea. I was thinking something like martyrdom.
edit- one might imagine actions that are activist that have incalculable or unknowable utility. "I don't know if what I'm doing will amount to anything, but I am nonetheless compelled." I don't believe that every ethical choice can be reduced to something like an economic tradeoff.
jamesj t1_jbgsbr5 wrote
This is puzzling if you think natural selection acts on the level of organisms, but completely explained (along with other altruistically motivated actions) I'd you think that natural selection acts on the level of genes (selfish gene theory).
frnzprf t1_jbivmg9 wrote
It's also evolutionary beneficial if people influence each other by communicating and so the personal morality of a human can be influenced socially, which is indirectly evolutionary.
Human babies are relatively uncapable in comparison to other animals and they learn important skills by copying. It's like IKEA furniture that is easier to produce and ship, because there is still some assembly required.
[deleted] t1_jbjrs5b wrote
>I'd you think that natural selection acts on the level of genes (selfish gene theory).
Yes but just about any human action can be argued to have evolutionary benefit, so we can't use this as a feature or a marker of ethical progress.
frogandbanjo t1_jbgkzfv wrote
People martyr themselves for dumb and evil shit all the time, though. It's just that we refuse to call it martyrdom at a particular point in time and so perpetuate the illusion of objective morality.
Once you let go, you begin to understand that all "heroism" can be put in a same category of baffling behavior as people who behave "evilly" when they reasonably ought to know they'll get punished for it anyway. Clearly the human mind is capable of either rejecting utilitarianism outright (even just personal utilitarianism,) slipping below the bare minimum knowledge/intelligence requirements to engage productively with it, or convincing itself that the unquantifiable trumps the quantifiable. Those do not have any strict relationship to heroic moral action. They happen with "evil" actions all the time.
GingerJacob36 t1_jbgxlac wrote
Interesting that you feel there is no objective morality. I think we can agree that what is best for some is not best for others without feeling like we can't navigate the territory at all.
Even the martyrs are acting in a utilitarian mindset, either for a good we now generally agree about, or for a less discernibly positive way.
Ischmetch t1_jbhr9gn wrote
Not necessarily. Some simply act for the sake of Aristotelian virtue.
GingerJacob36 t1_jbjw0rv wrote
But it's not just courage for the sake of courage. There is always a motivating ethic of some kind, or a desire for change.
frogandbanjo t1_jbkro5x wrote
Morality doesn't follow from first-order premises (truth claims about the universe,) and so it's in even worse shape than "reality" is when challenged by Descartes. It relies upon either a middle or supplemental step to get to where it wants to go. That middle or supplemental step can be rejected by anyone trivially.
Push yourself to ask hard questions. What if ruthlessly enslaving 90% of the human race is the only way to ensure that humanity doesn't spoil its only life support system and doom itself to civilizational collapse and accelerated extinction? Personally, when I consider such hypotheticals, I become uncomfortable with even the vague notion that there is an objectively correct moral answer to them, regardless of whether I think I know what it is.
If you don't, by all means. Recognize that various moral systems posited throughout history would offer up both conflicting rationales and even conflicting answers outright, and then claim with confidence that surely there is an objectively correct answer, even if perhaps you don't know it.
GingerJacob36 t1_jbt5h6m wrote
That question doesn't negate the existence of an objective morality. If the scenario you presented was one possible way of life, we could all agree that it would not be the best one. It is objectively not as good for as many people as many other ways to live. Enslaving 60% of the population would be much better, and enslaving 0% would be much better than that. These are all objectively better than each other, and that thought process can continue into pretty much anything else that we encounter.
It's not that it wouldn't be a hard question to answer, but it's not an impossible one to answer and there are metrics along which that decision could be made.
JohannesdeStrepitu t1_jbhgl6v wrote
> But it seems like we have a sense that moral activism would-have-been-right so many times, and times when it is not the sociocultural norm.
Where here or in his written work does Blackburn imply otherwise?
[deleted] t1_jbjjnnw wrote
In this video he sort of goes through this history of Truth-seeking and at the end of this video, landing on Robert Brandom who is a deflationist. Brandom reduces (my opinion) morality to the making-explicit-of a "discursive rationality", which (I believe he implies) originates from implicit... practices?
All of that seems fine to me (logical, pragmatic), except it seems to say that Moral Good (which we make explicit always later) is dependent upon the happenstance of a landscape of possible actions with respect to that discursivity.
To say it stupidly, if one imagines the actions of the present time as a bunch of lines on a hurricane spaghetti model, the actions we later define as "good" are those ones which happened not to strike land. In this way, Moral Good (I'm specifically talking about non-normative Moral Good, thus "cancelling out" the utility of actions) at present is chaotic. To me this is intuitively repugnant. I believe humans can intuit moral good. I believe humans can "tap into something" morally good, when the world around them is screaming otherwise, even placing them at great peril. I think deflationism leads to [Brandom and Blackburns] conclusion about morality [that it is, in the moment, chaotic].
JohannesdeStrepitu t1_jbkgbdf wrote
At what timestamp does he mention Brandom? I don't remember Brandom coming up in the video (though given the context I did almost hear 'Brandom' when he talked about 'rebranding' the redundancy theory of truth as the deflationary theory). Brandom's anaphoric/prosentential theory of truth is definitely a version of deflationism but I don't know if Blackburn specifically had Brandom in mind when he mentioned deflationism at the end (again, unless I missed that moment or there's a longer version of this video?).
In any case, I don't think your worry applies to Brandom's account of truth. Yes, he does take the content of our thoughts and utterances to depend on how those discursive acts make explicit norms within larger social practices. However, those are specifically practices of giving and asking for reasons (his "deontic scorekeeping") and the structure of that scorekeeping in the cases of science, morality, and a host of everyday topics - e.g. what food is in the fridge, to take Blackburn's example - is specifically one of representing objects (his "de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes"). Those two features alone easily makes room for a minority of moral activists in a community to be right and even for an entire community to be wrong, since by making claims that answer not just to one another (in a community) but to objects they specifically point to limitations in individual perspectives on the truth and even to all of the perspectives the community has so far.
None of this would look like "tapping into something" in a sense that looks like a direct intuition of the moral good but it would involve responding to the objective moral features of the world, just in a way that involves a fundamentally perspectival access to those objective truths and a need to arrive at that truth by learning from the perspectives of others (including perspectives that no one in one's community has yet reached).
[deleted] t1_jbkyjxq wrote
That all sounds great to me. And I think
>responding to the objective moral features of the world, just in a way that involves a fundamentally perspectival access to those objective truths and a need to arrive at that truth by learning from the perspectives of others (including perspectives that no one in one's community has yet reached).
is obviously much better than "tapping into something". I do not have the best words. And admittedly I'm not well read on Blackburn OR Brandom, but I cannot help myself maundering. Thank you for humoring me!
edit- I have no clue where I got Brandom, it's very possible I was reading SEP and listening to the video at the same time, apologies.
JohannesdeStrepitu t1_jbl2rh2 wrote
Glad I could clear things up :) Brandom's someone I've spent a lot of time reading and talking with others about in my studies, so I'm always happy to talk about him more.
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