Yo Z,
You what happens when you assume, right?
Completely different. There is an explicit end you are attempting to achieve. This is the only instance were I can understand a “should” as not implicitly absolute. On the other hand, if you strolled up to me with my Wagner and 50 gallons of “Cwazy Cotton Candy” and said,
“You shouldn’t paint your house pink”
With the completely unfounded assumption that my intent is to sell it, you are just being an authoritarian.
And what’s wrong with being authoritarian? 
Jackson, to clarify. If your end is to sell your house, research has shown that painting it pink may not be the best means towards it. If your end is not to have your a** kicked, research has shown that kicking someone may not be the best means towards it. That’s all. It’s still all up to you.
Z.
Z,
Yes, which is why your last post didn’t help the case for ethic or moral laws very much.
Jackson,
Yes, which has never been my case to begin with.
The “Ought” in this statement only makes sense if there is a definite end the chef is attempting to accomplish (best chef in town award, keeping his job, etc.).
Which there obviously is.
The market will determine what he “Ought” and “Ought Not” do. The simple majority consensus about “Good” and “Bad” does not adaquetly determine what actions people will take.
Adequate to whom? Nothing can determine what actions people will take, that isn’t a branch of ethics I’m aware of. There is no reason to think of a community as something entirely distinct from a market, a bit more psychological but its all still social interaction. You ought to act according to the demands of people or you might be put out of business.
But what are normative statements? Normative statements, in my view, are actually value-expressions.
It is clear that there is some defining difference between ethical valuations and other kinds of valuation. I suspect that this difference lies within us not within the nature of the statements themselves.
Clayton -
But there is a normative dimension to aesthetic valuation. “You should do your makeup this way” “you should use these pigments on your oil painting” “you should put the couch over there” and so on.
No, that’s what law is about. Ethics is the pre-legal canvas on which laws get painted.
But what is “obligation”? We’re right back full-circle to the same problem. Here are three different ways to look at ethics:
I’m still working through this so this list may be incomplete.
Clayton -
Addressing Theory vs. evidence. Isn’t the formulation of theory based on observation? Observe a pheonomon and try to explain it? Isn’t anything we observe evidence?
‘Yes. If there were certain commonly held goals which the populations you refer to were attempting to achieve, certain actions would prove to be better at achieving them. If village unity was one, I could see how killing, raping, and looting would be discouraged.’
But if it is commonly held regardless of the individual then it ceases to be subjective.
'Hmm, so ethics can be considered equitable to aesthetics, and ethics can also be reasoned into absolutes.
So tell me Clay, what is the “right” color to paint my house next spring?’
Well if one were to equate aesthetics with ethics then that would be a valid question. I’m still trying to figure out if Clayton actually does think that aesthetics is ethics and ethics is economic valuation. I think there is a clear dividing line between aesthetics and ethics.
Of course, for there to be action there must be motive. But an observer will not necessarily know what that motive is.
Obviously, but this has little to do with applying normative statements to an entrpreneur with no information on either the motivation of said entrepreneur, or his clientele.
That definition is incomplete, IMO. I would consider them value expressions stated as recommendations or commands. Moral statements could be considered value expressions stated as fact or law. I know some (Angurse) will disagree, but what can you do?
I would contend that position. The difference between a statement of preference and a statement of “truth” is subtle, but important. Granted, descriptively the action may be identical, but the perception (and subsequent reaction) observers might have towards said action could be extremely varied depending on the perceived intent. If an action is viewed as “righteous” by its observers, it is much more likely to be accepted, regardless of the descriptive action’s results or ramifications.
Example - The genocide of Native American populations during the settlement of the New World. Would these same practices be tolerated if the Walloons attempted it against the Flemish (or vise versa)? But in that period atrocities executed against “savages” was completely acceptable.
Or perhaps if I had attempted to keep a white person as a slave in the antebellum United States. How well would that’ve gone over?
I agree. The implicit conclusion to those statements is “… if you want me to find it attractive” You are treating your preference as truth (as in any normative statement). It is rather easy to be skeptical of this claim (personal appearance-preference as truth). If one wanted to add some “umph” to help manipulate your opinion to be more in line with theirs, they can resort to an appeal to you superstitious susceptibility,
“God says you should do your makeup this way”
“It’s scientifically proven you should use these pigments”
“9 out of 10 people in our society put their couch over there, you should to.”
etc.
If you believe that intersubjective consensus is capable of divining truth, fine. That doesn’t automatically, necessarily, mean it is truly capable.
What is it?
But what is a recommendation or a command? It cannot, of its own accord, modify behavior. Only if it is paired with a threat or rides on some other behavior-modifying disposition in the mind (say, guilt) can it modify behavior. A command is just another statement.
Well, the distinction between a statement of truth and a statement of preference is the subject of the statement. Human language, in this regard, is very tricky and deceptive which complicates the issue. For example, if you say “This statue is white” or “This statue is hard” you are saying something about the statue. But if you say “This statue is beautiful” you are saying something completely different. It appears that you are attributing a property to the statue but you are, in fact, discussing yourself. You are really saying “I enjoy viewing this statue” or “I derive pleasure or satisfaction from viewing this statue”. We can further rephrase to be a value-statement, “I prefer viewing this statue to not viewing it (or to whatever I would be doing other than viewing it).” The subject of the phrase “This statue is beautiful” is only superficially the statue. The real subject is, in fact, yourself.
This distinction is crucially important when we move back to the realm of ethics. “You should not murder” is not really a statement about you, it’s a statement about myself. That is, it is a statement that I find the act of murder or even the thought of murder displeasing.
Where this gets more complex is that ethical statements affect us in a completely different way than aesthetic statements do. Normativeness cannot be the defining difference between aesthetics and ethics since aesthetics may be normative, as well (“You should not mix spring colors with pastels.”) I suspect that our brains are wired to make us feel bad (guilt, shame) when we feel that we have violated a genuine ethical norm. Again, I’m still working through this so my thoughts are incomplete, but I suspect that the brain circuitry for this must be the same or very similar to the circuitry that triggers feelings of embarrassment or awkwadness when we feel we have violated a genuine social norm. Aesthetic norms don’t seem to me to have the same kind of effect (who gets embarrassed or feels guilty for picking the wrong color drapes?)
Clayton -
But we’re discussing what “should” itself means and you are rephrasing the original “should” statement in terms of other “should” statements. If I say, “you should put the couch over there” it is understood that, as a matter of course, I am speaking for myself. I need not appeal to God’s tastes, to science or to polls because I am the final authority on my own tastes. However, I think it is a mistake to characterize this as a purely individualistic statement as in, “This is completely arbitrary and totally reflects only my own tastes but, I think you should put the couch over there.”
Let’s say the couch is off-center to the room and a picture - centered to the room - is hanging above it. My recommendation is not arbitrary, I am suggesting that you “balance” the room by “correctly” adjusting the couch to the center of the room. I am not merely stating my own, possibly bizarre and arbitrary, preference. Rather, I’m appealing to the principles that underly human aesthetic taste (balance, symmetry, visual structure, positive/negative space, etc.) and pointing out that the couch would be more consistent with those principles and therefore more pleasingly placed (in my opinion) if it were moved. If I had suggested moving the couch into an even less aesthetically pleasing position, you might object and say something like, “Are you crazy? It looks completely wrong over there.”
Clayton -
I agree that a command must rely on some sort of method of convincing the commanded, but it is still distinct from a passive statement,
“I like coffee”
versus
“Everyone should like coffee”
The latter is a projection of the statees will (preference) over the listener.
I disagree. I cannot discern a distinction between stating,
“The statue is white”
and,
“the statue is beautiful”
other than the specific percieved proprty of the statue the statee is commenting upon. I observe the statue, and I am drawing conclusions about the statue based on those observations. The only distinction I can draw is that you are willing to accept some of those conclusions (the ones based upon a consentual observation) and not others (those which cannot be quantified by more than one individual). Both of the afforementioned statments are equally “statements anout myself”, to use your phrase.
But those aesthetic normatives can be considered equally as valid or invalid as ethical norms. Without knowing my intended goals, that normative statement is completely arbitrary in relation to me, and is clearly an implicit statement of your belief in the righteousness of your deduction.
That is a projection of your opinion in regards to the priorities people assign to certain “classes” of actions. Some people take fashion faux pas’ very seriously. I would posit the severity of emotion one feels when violating one of their “laws” is wholly dependent on how serious one considers that offense. I am highly suspect that actions can be universally organized into objective “levels of severity”.
I’m not saying that you need to appeal to an external source to draw your conclusions on the couch, but to convince me that those conclusions are worth heeding, “Because I said so” will likely not be adequate. Basically I was saying,
OK, on to the next one…
If not completely individualistic, then what? I’m sure your opinion is completely justified to you! It is my position that without a priori knowledge of my desired end, your normative is arbitrary, relative to me. Saying that your opinion is more valid because it rests on your conclusions regarding percieved phenomena (science) is not necessarily any different than I thinking my opinion is more valid because Krishna is speaking through me.
Your Humanistic faith is not very compelling. We cannot know if “principles” you refer to are any more or less objectively valid than if you had said the Flying Spaghetti Monster had told you to center couches in rooms forever and ever, amen.
You would be merely appealing to my faith in the validity of the science of aesthetics in order to convince me to allow you to impose your will over my couch and myself.
“Religion is the opiate of the people” - Karl Marx
The “validity” of human aesthetics is beside the point - either humans generally prefer symmetric forms or they do not. We can study people’s preferences and find that there is, in fact, a culturally universal preference for symmetric forms. That observation, of course, carries no normative force but I was merely asserting that my aesthetic evaluation of the couch’s situation is not arbitrary and my recommendation that you adopt my aesthetic evaluation and take action on that basis (move the couch) is based on an appeal to the same aesthetic circuitry in your brain that prefers symmetry over asymmetry that I have in my brain.
No, I would be appealing to your aesthetic instincts. There is a big difference between, on the one hand, appealing to an aesthetic “science” which would have to be built from foundational axioms and could not be any other way than it is and, on the other hand, appealing to your aesthetic instincts which could have evolved a different way than they did.
Clayton -
If I had those very same instincts, we would not be having the conversation, since the couch would already be where our shared instincts compelled me to place it.
You seem to have accepted scientific deductions as truth so completely, you are misunderstanding me. The science is based on our imperfect observations, making the conclusions we draw, even using the scientific method, similarly imperfect. You justify your action as righteous because you belive that interpreting phenomena with the scientific method allows you to grasp the truth. It is on faith you command me.