Moral Theories (broadly)

[kmik]

The way you've outlined them, the difference between the absolutist and the pluralist is a vague matter of degree. There's not a fundamental distinction between the two.

Could you please elaborate on that?

 

[Demiurge]

how would you explain the basis of that view?

The thesis that all non-cognitivists would agree to is that moral judgments are not truth apt. That is, they are neither true, nor false. They might think of them as desires or emotions, for example. One might argue that 'stealing is wrong' is equivalent to the statement that stealing makes the speaker feel bad. Although it is either true that it makes the speaker feel bad or it is false, the feeling itself is neither true, nor false.

indeed, that's the way it seems to me, I've never met a pluralist who was a relativist, i.e., not absolute about something, they're merely liberal about their absolutism, such that they want to see not one absolute view dominate, but to see them all try to agree and respect eachother on a variety of at least private issues (rather than, like, having sodomy become illegal again n the like).

does it mean something different as you understand it?

It seems that you will never meet a pluralist who is a relativist because of your definition. The relativist, apparently, will not affirm that any moral judgments are universal, whereas the pluralist does affirm that moral judgments are universal, just fewer than the absolutist. Hence, we might say that the pluralist is absolutist about some judgments, but relativist about others. I think that everyone will wind up being a pluralist, then. I can scarcely imagine anyone who thinks that there is a universally true judgment about every single moral issue humans concern themselves with. Some might, however, say that supposedly moral issues which are not conducive to truth apt-judgments are not moral at all.

I hope I made a point there somewhere... I'm too tired to tell.

 

[Seditious]

The thesis that all non-cognitivists would agree to is that moral judgments are not truth apt. That is, they are neither true, nor false. They might think of them as desires or emotions, for example. One might argue that 'stealing is wrong' is equivalent to the statement that stealing makes the speaker feel bad. Although it is either true that it makes the speaker feel bad or it is false, the feeling itself is neither true, nor false..

That's what I've always heard of called "Emotivism" (I guess because that is the most popular form of Non-Cognitivism) which is itself just a reason for being a Relativist (it would be the theory which explains why someone is a relativist, as someone might be categorized as a theist, and the theory of christianity is the particular argument they hold as the reason for belonging to that category) not something different to the categories I suggested.

I think that everyone will wind up being a pluralist, then. I can scarcely imagine anyone who thinks that there is a universally true judgment about every single moral issue humans concern themselves with.

I'm a subjectivist myself, others here are relativists, and theists tend to think there exists an unquestionable moral truth about everything, even if they themselves don't know it, they suppose there is no moral concern over which we can say 'well it doesn't matter either way' or 'maybe there is no truth about it' they can only say 'only God knows for sure' and draw back to see the likely absolute ruling their god would make based on the parts they do know, so they still hold the absolutist principle. So I don't think your suggestion here is true, though of course our world is becoming more and more pluralist.[/QUOTE]

 

[Demiurge]

I am not going to drop out of the thread like I did last time. I'll get back to you tomorrow.

 

[Demiurge]

That's what I've always heard of called "Emotivism" (I guess because that is the most popular form of Non-Cognitivism) which is itself just a reason for being a Relativist (it would be the theory which explains why someone is a relativist, as someone might be categorized as a theist, and the theory of christianity is the particular argument they hold as the reason for belonging to that category) not something different to the categories I suggested.

No, it is different because the non-cognitivist will not talk of judgments being 'true' for anyone. The main point is that moral judgments are not truth apt.

Also, note that the distinction between cognitivism and nog-cognitism is quite crisp, whereas your distinction between pluralism and absolutism is not. In determining whether someone is an absolutist or a pluralist, it is natural for an argument to break out about precisely how many supposedly moral issues one must take an absolutist stance. That is, if one is an absolutist about n issues, is n enough to be classified an absolutist or is pluralist more appropriate? On the other hand, it is comparatively easy to distinguish between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Are moral judgments truth-apt or not? The answer to that question decides the issue with minimal fuzziness around the edges. My problem with your system is that it is too vague. Two supposedly distinct classes mix together. It would be better to draw the lines as follows: relativism: truth value of moral judgments is relative to individual, culture, etc.; absolutism: truth value of moral judgments is not context-sensitive; non-cognitivism: moral judgments have no truth value. I think this way of doing it hits on more fundamental distinctions, whereas yours is more about degree.

I'm a subjectivist myself, others here are relativists,

What is a subjectivist? How does it differ from a relativist?

and theists tend to think there exists an unquestionable moral truth about everything, even if they themselves don't know it, they suppose there is no moral concern over which we can say 'well it doesn't matter either way' or 'maybe there is no truth about it' they can only say 'only God knows for sure' and draw back to see the likely absolute ruling their god would make based on the parts they do know, so they still hold the absolutist principle. So I don't think your suggestion here is true, though of course our world is becoming more and more pluralist.

What I was thinking is that it is still open for the absolutist to say about an issue that people use moral language to discuss that there are no context independent moral facts about it. That is to say, though absolutism affirms that moral judgments are not context dependent, it doesn't indicate which issues people discuss using moral discourse are really moral issues. It seems quite likely that most everyone will conclude that some issues that at least one person sees in moral terms are not really about morality. I hope this is clearer than my last post.

 

[derbeder]

It would be better to draw the lines as follows: relativism: truth value of moral judgments is relative to individual, culture, etc.; absolutism: truth value of moral judgments is not context-sensitive; non-cognitivism: moral judgments have no truth value. I think this way of doing it hits on more fundamental distinctions, whereas yours is more about degree.

What I was thinking is that it is still open for the absolutist to say about an issue that people use moral language to discuss that there are no context independent moral facts about it. That is to say, though absolutism affirms that moral judgments are not context dependent, it doesn't indicate which issues people discuss using moral discourse are really moral issues.

In this post you seem to be equating the context-independence of the truth of a statement with its being absolutely true. But I assume this is just a manner of speaking here. Context-dependence is a very different phenomenon than truth relativism. There is a whole lot of contemporary work in philosophy that is concerned with the difference between context sensitivity and truth relativism proper (in ascriptions of knowledge, epistemic modality and future contingents), as I believe you are familiar.

 

[Demiurge]

In this post you seem to be equating the context-independence of the truth of a statement with its being absolutely true. But I assume this is just a manner of speaking here. Context-dependence is a very different phenomenon than truth relativism. There is a whole lot of contemporary work in philosophy that is concerned with the difference between context sensitivity and truth relativism proper (in ascriptions of knowledge, epistemic modality and future contingents), as I believe you are familiar.

Right, I understand your point. Basically, all that I intend in this instance is that according to relativism, if one had a god's eye view, he would still be unable to discern universal moral standards because moral judgments are true relative to individuals, cultures, social instutions, etc. Every moral judgment is relative to a context of assessment. So, judgment J is true in context(subject, time) c, but not true in c*. Whereas if universalism is true, J is true in all contexts. I suppose it could still vary with worlds, but we can make that double-relativization distinct from the normal conext.

 

[Demiurge]

Let me mention something that might clarify. Say you have a realm of discourse, D, and let P be a predicate in that region of discourse. If the beliefs of practitioners covary with facts about the instantiation of P, there are two explanations. One of these is that the beliefs are tracking facts about the extension of P, which are independent of the beliefs. We can call this judgment independence. On the other hand, it is also possible that the beliefs are determining, rather than tracking, the extension of P. The beliefs are themselves are extension determining, instead of extension reflecting. This is judgment dependence. Moral relativism is analogous to the latter.

 

[derbeder]

I'll clarify what I mean by "context-dependent" and "relative" (with respect to truth) a little.

A sentence is context-dependent if it can be used to say different things in different contexts (which differ by speaker, time, place and so on). For instance, when I say "I am a student" I mean something different from when my mother says "I am a student". What I say thereby say is true, but what she says is false. The presence of indexical expressions such as "I", "you", "here", "now" and demonstratives "that" and "this" make a sentence context-sensitive. But it has been argued that other less obvious expressions generate context-sensitivity as well, such as "every", "the", and even "know" and "believe".

If a sentence such as

(1) Abortion should be allowed

is context-sensitive, then one can mean different things by uttering tokens of this sentence. So suppose a community of speakers accept this sentence and another community of speakers reject it and utter the negation of (1). If (1) is really context-dependent, then both community of speakers can be speaking the truth, because they mean different things when they utter (1). Is this really what's going on in moral disagreements where one group vehemently rejects what the other asserts? Is it because "should" is context-sensitive that there appear to be moral disagreements in which both of the opposing sides can be right? Probably not. First of all, there are certain linguistic tests for context-dependence that clearly context-dependent expressions such as "I" and "that" pass but "should" does not. If "should" is context-sensitive, it is pretty much sui generis. Furthermore, the situation just described simply does not appear to be a genuine disagreement - it seems instead that the two parties simply do not understand one another. If they understood what each other meant, they could even accept what each other says.

The concept of truth-relativity is different from context-dependence. Let's call what one means when uttering a sentence a proposition. A sentence is context-sensitive if it expresses different propositions in different contexts (different speaker, time and so on). In contrast, the concept of truth-relativity is applied in the first place to propositions. In order to give a smooth account of modal expressions such as "necessarily" and "possibly", propositions are taken to have truth values relative to what are called possible worlds (at this point it does not matter what these things are, or whether any appeal to them can be completely eliminated). A proposition is necessarily true if it is true at every world, and possible if it is true in some world. What I mean by "Aristotle was a philosopher" is the same as what anyone else means by it, and what we all mean by it is true but only contingently so because Aristotle could have pursued some other profession.

Now, it is rather standard to assume that propositions have truth values only relative to worlds and nothing else. Earlier it was not uncommon to assume that relativization to times was necessary for an account of the meaning of tense inflictions, but this is no longer so (and for good reason). Recently, some semanticists have provided theories which relativize the truth of a proposition to other things as well, including, what we may abstractly call judges (we can think of these as communities of people here). Some of these are proposed in order to give a good account of expressions which are clearly not evaluative, such as epistemic modals ("I might win the lottery").

Now two judges can agree completely on what proposition is expressed by a sentence in a context and differ in the truth-value that the proposition has according to them. Suppose relative to one judge the proposition expressed by (1) above is true, while according to the other it is false. In that case one group of people can assert that abortion should be allowed and the other assert that it should not be allowed and both can be speaking the truth according to their point of evaluation.

Is this an attractive account? There are some reasons to think that we will stretch the notion of the truth of a proposition too far to recognize this sort of truth-relativity. There is a general difficulty with making sense of embeddings of "should" and epistemic "might" on this view, and that provides a very good reason to reject this linguistic proposal. But, I won't elaborate on that here. There are more general philosophical reasons to be unhappy with taking propositions expressed by sentences with moral expressions in them to be true relative to people, communities or whatever.

 

[Demiurge]

A nice example of the context dependence of sentence use is found in Strawson. If someone says 'the king of france is wise,' it is used differently depending on who is the king of France. The sentence itself has no truth value, only the uses of the sentence do.

Nice account, by the way. Moral relativism should be truth relative. It should be captured by something like Crispin Wright's idea of judgement dependence, which was summarized very tersely in my earlier post.

 

[speed]

Right, I understand your point. Basically, all that I intend in this instance is that according to relativism, if one had a god's eye view, he would still be unable to discern universal moral standards because moral judgments are true relative to individuals, cultures, social instutions, etc. Every moral judgment is relative to a context of assessment. So, judgment J is true in context(subject, time) c, but not true in c*. Whereas if universalism is true, J is true in all contexts. I suppose it could still vary with worlds, but we can make that double-relativization distinct from the normal conext.

Demiurge, you paraphrase and cut through the nonsense so well. I-- a increasingly lazy, and increasingly disinterested philosophical dilletante-- thank you for your excellent posts.

 

[derbeder]

Wright uses his notion of judgment-dependence to give an account of the response-dependence of secondary qualities such as color. There are some problems with his attempt, however. Mark Johnston and Phillip Pettit have some interesting alternative accounts.

Wright taught a seminar on relativism and context-dependence a couple years ago at NYU to which I attended. He has since written a bunch of recent papers (some yet to be published) on these matters, ‘Intuitionism, Realism, Relativism and Rhubarb’
‘Relativism about Truth itself’ and ‘New Age Relativism and Epistemic Possibility'. The last two can be found here:
http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/crispinwright

 

[Seditious]

What is a subjectivist? How does it differ from a relativist?

As a subjectivist, I'm not going to say 'oh, of course it's wrong to kill, I mean you all agreed on that right? you claim that that is true in this circumstance, in this society right?' I can't say that the Nazi party was any more "wrong" to kill Jews than Texas is in killing under the name "capital punishment". I consider the Emotivist (the type of non-cognitivist you earlier outlined) to be a subjectivist (or at least able to be one), because he's saying 'well, you're all expressing your feelings here, but guess what, I feel differently, and your feelings aren't a compelling argument for me to feel otherwise'.

What I was thinking is that it is still open for the absolutist to say about an issue that people use moral language to discuss that there are no context independent moral facts about it. That is to say, though absolutism affirms that moral judgments are not context dependent, it doesn't indicate which issues people discuss using moral discourse are really moral issues. It seems quite likely that most everyone will conclude that some issues that at least one person sees in moral terms are not really about morality. I hope this is clearer than my last post.

yea, that's definitely a good point I need to reflect on a little more.

The way I've come to use the word "moral" is really in two senses; moral fact, and moral status. I consider anything to the harm of another person "immoral" (since this is typically the way it is employed---we don't really say anymore, in a secular context, doing harm to yourself is "immoral", but anyone harming someone else always ends up being given a negative moral status), and since insults and imprisonment of criminals and the like are accepted in "liberty" I consider them immoral factually (since the inprisoned or insulted are subjectively devalued), but one's moral status is not necessarily lesser for doing them, for these are accepted immoralities. So in using the language that way I find a clear moral fact about any interpersonal/social situation, and that is subject dependent (if I subjectively feel you've done something immoral, being rude to me or something, if you didn't directly cause it---if that wouldn't be the case independent of my beliefs/emotional weaknesses---then obviously you've done one of those acceptable immoralities, acceptable because we can't be left to the mercy of the say so of subjects for moral condemnation). So, in this way I would argue against "the 7 deadly sins" and "suicide" etc. being "immoral" because they don't regard a direct negative effect on an agent who is not consensual. In that sense there is a moral fact about the matter---the fact is that it is outside of the realm of moral judgment, and thus not fit for moral status to be ascribed to the participant.

On this framework, I acknowledge moral facts, but I see no argument for why I am supposed to only do certain things (or why only certain immoralities man has no right to---man can defend himself as righteous in opposing politically), and so while I can see 'killing, and cussing are clearly -potential- immoralities' (is the person not insulted, or is he seeking helping in dying, clearly, on my framework, in that case we have no 'immorality' occuring (even if the society will rank me among the immoral for it)), I see no reason to say 'ok, these are things which I should not do'. Nothing about the moral fact, or the society giving something a moral status (a low status in Nazi Germany for protecting Jews from extermination, or a low status in the US for 'harbouring criminals'), gives me a reason to seek to do what will give me a positive moral status, or be factually "moral" in my behavior (reasons can include 'not being thrown in jail', but of course I mean 'no persuasion, no argument, no duty per se'). I can agree 'on this definition, that is immoral' but I cannot agree 'I have a duty to not do immoral things' or 'I have a duty to not do -some- immoral things'.

That gap between an idea or ideal and a duty to strive to live by it is that which I made the 'human dignifity worthy of respect' thread about. I'm doing my best to look, but every time I find a thinker get to that point where I think he's going to give me a reason to do that which is moral on his theory, he does not.


I'm curious how you use the words yourself, are the moral fact/value issues more problematic on your definitions?

And also curious if you see a problem in my approach (I guess after that rant I'd summarize the bottom line as moral facts being thus clear, but 'positive moral status' being something one has no argument for adhering to, thus making oneself a subjectivist, because, until we're given a reason to "Be moral" as if it is "our duty", the only thing in 'moral concerns' we can find to care about is how they affect ourselves, our own subjective value or disvalue in consequence).

(tried to post yesterday but the forum stopped workin' for me)