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From: ddfr@tank.uchicago.edu (david director friedman)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: Moral blindness
Message-ID: <7244@tank.uchicago.edu>
Date: 17 Jan 90 06:19:13 GMT
References: <7788@unix.SRI.COM> <9440032@hpsemc.HP.COM>
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 65


The central issue of this thread seems to be whether normative
judgements, like positive judgements, assert facts, or merely record
tastes, preferences, etc. While I am not an objectivist, on this
particular point I think I am on their side. I am at least willing to
argue that normative statements ("you should not have done that")
have as good a claim to being true or false as positive statements
("there is a glass sitting on the table.")

I start by asking why I believe the positive statement is anything
more than an assertion about what is happening in my head. ("I
perceive a glass on the table.") The answer, I think, is that not
only do I perceive a glass on the table, I also perceive the other
things I would perceive if there were an objective reality out there,
perceptible to other people. Among other things, I perceive you
saying "yes, that is my glass" in resonse to my commenting on the
glass. This does not prove objective reality; I could be imagining
both the glass and you. But it at least means that the conjecture
that objective reality is out there passes the only test
(consistency) that I am in a position to impose on it.

Suppose it did not pass that test. Suppose you reply "what glass?,"
and someone else says "table? How can there be a table in the middle
of the swimming pool?" At some point, if it does not look as though
they are all joking, I begin to suspect that I am dreaming, or crazy,
or in some other way failing to perceive objective reality--either
because it is not there or because my perception is bad.

My next step is to claim that the "normative universe"--the set of
propositions about good and bad, ought and ought not, meets the test
of consistency about as well as the positive universe. It is my
impression that most people, most of the time, if they clearly
observe the same set of facts about a situation, reach the same
normative conclusion. 

Many people will disagree with this proposition. I think there are
two reasons. First, most situations we discuss, or even observe, are
imperfectly specified. There are a lot of things we do not know about
the situation which we perceive as morally relevant. This is clear
even in hypothetical situations. When a libertarian and a socialist
argue about some hypothetical rights issue involving a capitalist and
a worker, it becomes clear on close enquiry that they are imagining
quite different circumstances. The libertarian's capitalist got his
capital by working hard while the lazy worker sat by; the socialist's
capitalist inherited his capital from his father, who stole it by
selling fraudulent goods. The fact that each party feels inclined to
bias his assumed facts is evidence that their underlying moral
intuitions are similar, and they therefore need different facts to
make those situations lead to different conclusions.

Second, most arguments on normative subjects, including essentially
all the ones on this newsgroup, are not about moral facts but about
moral theories. Moral theories (objectivist ethics, for instance) are
analogous to physical theories--complicated sets of ideas created in
trying to explain moral facts (i.e. our judgements about specific
situations) just as physical theories are created in trying to
explain physical facts. The observation that people disagree about
the ethics of property (a moral theory) no more demonstrates that
moral facts are not objective than the observation that people
disagree about economics or climate models (positive theories)
demonstrates that physical facts are not objective.

This could be a long posting, so I will end here.

David Friedman