The serial killer percieves killing to be in his interest atleast.
People act with intent to improve their situation, this is not disproven by the fact that people do not always choose actions which will actually achieve their desired goal.
A much better example than murder would have been suicide, using it would have demonstrated the fallacy of your objective values.
How would it have demonstrated anything of the sort? He’s not an Objectivist, he’s not a utilitarian, so at least make sure you know what you’re objecting to.
-Jon
Value is subjective in 2 senses: in that actions must be described in terms of the beliefs of the agents, and that agent’s can only be mistaken in their choice of means, not their ultimate end. It is objective in 2 other senses: agents can make mistakes of constitutive means (that is, we can be wrong about what counts as achieving a goal, in addition to what causes us to achieve a goal) and that people can be mistaken about what actually is the good.
The serial killer may think that he is furthering his own ends (acting towards “the good”), but he is, in fact, not. He is making a mistake in the constitutive means that he is using.
Why does morality have to depend on our individual “interests”? I do not subscribe to subjectivist morality, but I also do not believe that value in the economic sense has a thing to do with morality - all people don’t have the “ultimate end” of promoting the objective good. A significant part of morality, as far as I’m concerned, is accepting it as your end and overcoming your other desires - i.e., making morality valuable.
Morality is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end, and that end is constitutive of your own personal flourishing. The objective good is what is objectivily good for you, and that is excelling as a human being, florurishing, self-actualization.
I disagree. Morality need not lean on individual ends, it need not even be an end of everyone. I don’t know what sort of moral system you subscribe to; myself, I am a believer in deontological ethics. As such, I think that satistifying your duty (that is, acting morally) is an end in itself. And while I think everyone ought have this as their ultimate end, I am also a follower of Austrian economics and therefore believe that everyone has their own subjective ends - which may or may not include morality. I do not see how subjective ends not necessarily including morality has any effect on the existence of objective morality.
How is one to act according to duty if they do not see it as valuable? Deontological approaches, after all, are focused on what one ought to value. Morality is significantly connected with motivation. Deontological ethics proscribe that one ought to be rational, but do not answer why. Wombatron’s ethical approach - Aristoteleanism - at least attempts to provide an answer to this; we are beings of which rationality is a feature, and thus connectedly, to which autonomy matters, as it is the defining feature of human flourishing. This is grossly oversimplifying, but it still is worth mentioning.
-Jon
Prettly easily.
His argument that values are objective is based on the assumption that all people value “survival and flourishing”.
Yeah, I re-read his posts and saw what you meant. His argument in essence was that values are objective in that things are valued because they can help attain the agents wants - it is believed to possess the properties that will achieve this. All living agents demonstrably prefer life over death. Values do not matter to the dead. It is true that some will value something that helps them end life - so all he need do is reformulate what he said, and it still stands. As for flourishing, some things will be conducive to it and others not, thus some “values” will be antithetical to it and others not, and this is objective. People seem to confuse agent-relativity with subjectivity.
-Jon
Much better put than my formulation. Thanks, Jon.
Agent-relativity vs. agent-neutrality is the important distinction, not objectivity vs. subjectivity. This tends to be one of the main points of confusion in reconciling Aristotelianism and Objectivism with Austrianism.
One would prove that they believe duty to be valuable by acting in accordance with it. How would one act at all unless they valued something over something else?
I have to disagree. Morality would exist, and would be unchanged, even if no one valued it and no one acted in accordance with it. But regardless, I don’t think deontological ethics have any less of a response to the question of “why should we value morality?” than Aristoteleanism. Deontological ethics replies with the idea that morality should be valued for its own sake, that is, it is instrinsically valuable. Aristoteleanism, as you explained it and as I understand it, simply assigns arbitrary ends (“human flourishing,” or whatever you wish to use) to everyone and says that therefore morality is valuable in achieving these supposed ends.
But why should morality be an end in itself?
This is where discussions of morality, that is, debating two separate systems, fall apart. I can’t give you a satistifactory answer to that question. I don’t think there is one. But, likewise, if I asked you, “why should human flourishing be an end in itself?”, I doubt that you could provide a satistifactory answer to me. Utilitarians, when asked, “why the greatest good for the greatest number?”, can’t give satistifactory answers. I’m inclined to say that debating morality at this basest of levels is basically impossible because neither side is going to have any logical requirement to agree with the other’s reasoning behind their system’s ultimate end. While I don’t think morality itself is at all psychological, I think individually choosing a moral system is almost completely psychological because there is simply no way to be convinced through reason alone to follow this or that morality.
You’d do well to read up on Aristotelian defences of a liberal society, rather than remaining content with that misconception of them. No, what Aristotelians (correctly) assert is that deontological ethicists give no account as to why one should value duty (or connectedly, autonomy.) By eschewing human nature and by adopting a static view of facts and values, deontological ethicists deprive themselves of significant tools in answering questions such as why one should value reason to begin with. Ethics is connected with how one ought to live one’s life - it is ridiculous to omit the most essential factor in answering such a question, namely the nature of the being to which the ethic pertains. Anyway, if you want a good defence of natural-end ethics see Long’s works, as well as Rasmussen’s and den Uyl’s Liberty and Nature and Norms of Liberty. I’m still wading through the books so I wouldn’t be able to offer a compelling defence at this stage, and certainly would do no justice to theirs.
-Jon
I’ve noted already that deontological ethics includes the idea that ethics are instrinsically valuable. The denial of morality’s value is of no consequence to that argument, it would simply mean that the denier has failed step one of acting morally. I admit that there is no chain of reasoning to get you to the point of holding morality as an end in itself.
Meanwhile, Aristoteleanism, unless I have completely misunderstood it, argues that everyone has certain ends, whether they are conscious of it or not, and therefore should value morality as a means to those universal ends. My question to that is: why should we assume that everyone has those ends? And what can your response be? You can’t convince someone purely by reason anymore than the deontological ethicist, all Aristoteleanism has done is change the assumptions a bit - instead of assuming morality to be valuable in itself, they have assumed that morality is valuable in achieving the universal ends which are…valuable in themselves. Aristotelean appeals to nature and all this are simply extensions of the question. I mean, why should we live according to what is “natural”? Not to mention, it is one of the strangest appeals to nature I’ve seen, in that it rejects many natural impulses, all natural consciousness, and so on, in its assigning of “natural” ends.
Well, that’s a major problem, isn’t it? Your whole case depends upon something you claim can’t be justified. You can’t give a reason for why anyone should value morality. I find this approach philosophically unsatisfactory. Even if you could provide a compelling reason, or a compelling case that you are justified in taking it for granted that most people value morality, this doesn’t get you any specific content for morality. You’d still need to provide reasons for why X is a duty. If, as is typical among deontologists, you adhere to some version of the Kantian universalizability principle, then you’ve got the problem of holding that only things that can be universalized to everyone in any context count as duties, i.e., moral. This ignores individual context, including inborn talents, social context, personal choices, the particulars of the particular situation the moral agent is in at the time of action, etc. Kant is famous for holding that you only count as moral if you do your duty dis-interestedly. But this is bizarre. He is also famous for holding that lying is always immoral, but this too is open to challenge. Why is lying as such always immoral? I can think of reasons why it might be the moral thing to do, such as when a kidnappers asks you where your daughter is hiding.
We don’t assume it. Praxeology holds that men act, they employ scarce means to attain their ends, in order to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a lesser. Aristotelian ethics holds that there is an ultimate end, a natural end, toward which we each aim. In the concrete, we each have a unique natural end, but it is comprised of both particular aspects as well as universal aspects shared by all human beings. There are certain general goods and virtues that are constitutive means (as opposed to instrumental means) for our natural end. They are ends-in-themselves, for they are valuable in their own rights, but they are also a means toward a higher end which includes them. See an article by Douglas Rasmussen in the JLS for why praxeology requires an ultimate end.
So?
No. We don’t assume it.
Perhaps you should read the relevant works by Aristotle, Aquinas, Henry Veatch, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Roderick Long, and Fred Miller, among others (such as myself).
This is a common mistake. You are here imposing a Hobbesian, positivist-empiricist conception on Aristotelian philosophy that is alien to it. You won’t be able to understand Aristotelian ethics if you don’t grasp Aristotelian essentialism and teleology as expounded by the philosophers mentioned above and those they cite.
Off the top of my head… two favorites of mine are Tom DiLorenzo’s “How Capitalism Saved America” and Murray Rothbard’s “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature”. I don’t know, they might be too general for your tastes if you’re interested in advancing the progress of certain special interests groups more than the rest of society. I tend more toward the Ron Paul view that we are all humans and that special enough.
I don’t feel it is a particularly important problem, no, and I never stated that the claim can’t be justified - all I said was that reason alone wasn’t going to get you there.
I don’t know that you can give a reason why anyone should value anything without making at least one unfounded assumption.
I don’t know that this is the case at all, I think Kant did a very good job getting from valuing morality to the categorical imperative in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Maybe his case would be less compelling to you, I was personally swayed by it.
If properly broadened to what the underlying maxim of action is, then I cannot think of a case where this is a problem. For example, on the surface it may seem immoral to take a career as a doctor, for instance, because if everyone took that exact same career then there wouldn’t be anyone to farm, no one to make all the equipment doctors use, and etc. However, the true maxim of action is not, “So as to cultivate and use my talents and productive capabilities, I shall become a doctor,” but rather, “So as to…capabilities, I shall specialize in a career which I have a comparative advantage in.”
Why is this bizarre? Simply because you don’t agree with it or because you cannot imagine valuing duty above all else?
Kant dealt with this sort of objection in On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns, and I would add that just because you have an obligation not to lie, you have no obligation to respond at all, and indeed, the moral action would likely be to refrain from saying anything to the kidnapper regarding your daughter’s location.
If you can provide a link, I’ll be glad to read it and get back to you with my commentary.
I was simply noting that for the sake of showing why the question is not a particularly important one to the topic at hand.
And deontological ethicists don’t assume that morality is an end in itself. We know it to be the case, that’s the basis of the ethical system we propose. But for the purposes of those who do not believe this, it is seen as an assumption, much as Aristotelean ultimate ends are seen as assumptions by those outside of that system (such as myself).
Again, links or at least specific titles would be helpful. I don’t know what all the relevant works are nor which are of the greatest importance to the question at hand.
Yes. It means that they are an idiot and are, in objective reality, denying themselves the benefits of social cooperation.
It seems you are trying to imply that I’m for coercing people to stop them from hurting themselves when that’s not the case. But yes, in a sense they probably are hurting themself. I merely want to point out that this is idiotic, and I will repeatedly do so in the hopes of perhaps having a slightly less idiotic society.
My argument is not primarily that it’s a vice (although it is), it’s that it’s irrational. Yes, I see no problem with opposing irrationality as such.
Well, both are self-proclaimed libertarian feminists, and Long is an anti-racist. From what I gather from my observation of white nationalists who see “cultural marxism” everywhere, merely falling into any of those categories would qualify someone as a “cultural marxist”.
I don’t mean to talk about older traditions. I mean to say that in the modern context, it is erroneous to assume that all anti-racists or multiculturalists are marxists or socialists - hence why I brought up McElroy and Long.
As for pluralism, that seems to be the heart of this issue: pluralism vs. homogeneity. I see a desire for homogeneity as irrational and ultimately futile, and I see pluralism as the inevitable outcome of liberty due to the vast diversity between people’s preferances and traits.