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From: nelson_p@apollo.HP.COM (Peter Nelson)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: Moral blindness
Message-ID: <4818d1b4.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Date: 17 Jan 90 23:23:00 GMT
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  ddfr@tank.uchicago.edu (david director friedman) posts...


>                                   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.")  

 Among humans there is wide disagreement over normative "truths".
 There is no broad disgreement over evidence-of-senses issues.  

 It is also very perilous for a libertarian or objectivist to base
 a belief system on "what people agree on".   If most everybody 
 agreed that it is OK for the state to take the property of the 
 rich to give to the poor, as they do to some extent, would this
 make it "right"?


>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. 
                       
 Absolute nonsense.  This is like someone who has lived all his 
 life in a Christian culture asserting that, since it is his
 impression that most people most of the time agree that God 
 exists, that the Christian God is as objectively extant as 
 the glass of water on that table over there.    If Mr. Friedman
 thinks there is such broad consensus on ethical issues he 
 either has not traveled to other cultures very much or he has
 not studied much history or anthropology.  

 I also suspect that by "clearly observe the same set of facts" 
 he means that they interpret the facts the way he does.  
 

>Many people will disagree with this proposition. I think there are
>two reasons. First, most situations we discuss, or even observe, are
>imperfectly specified. 

  Even when situations are pefectly specified different people
  have *different moral values*.   Some Plains Indians tribes, when
  a warrior was killed, would ostracize the wife if she were past
  childbearing age, leaving her to die of exposure.  Some pre-
  Columbian cultures used to practice human sacrifices on prisoners.
  Speaking of prisoners, the Japanese during WWII used to mistreat
  POWs in unspeakably hideous ways.  Infanticide has been a commonly
  employed method of population control in many cultures.   The
  NAZIs during WWII killed millions of Jews.  Wifebeating is
  common and acceptable in many cultures.  All of these and many 
  other things that people have done violate *our* norms.   If
  Mr. Friedman thinks that this problem disappears when the facts
  are better specified I'm sure we'd be interested to hear how.


>                     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.

  Still, the onus is on moral philosophers to show that they ARE
  discussing an objective phenomenon.                                           

  Also, Mr. Friedman is mistaken in thinking that it is the disagreement,
  per se, that suggests moral theories are non-objective.  

  Physical scientists disagree all the time.  That doesn't mean
  physical science is non-objective.  The recent flap over cold
  fusion illustrates this.   When scientists disagreed over whether 
  cold fusion ocurred they all went back to their laboratories and 
  tried to duplicate the results, looking for excess heat and 
  evidence of a nuclear process (neutrons, tritium, etc).  
  The point is that even if there was disagreement about the
  phenomenon there was *agreement* about what had to be observed to 
  resolve the issue.   Ultimately physical science is rooted in
  evidence-of-senses and its ability to create or predict evidence-
  of-senses phenomena in the real world.   Moral philosophers
  have no common tools or common vocabulary to resolve their
  disputes.   

  While physical science demonstrably progresses, philosophers 
  and religionists continue to waste their time shouting at each
  other, "Is not!", "Is too!", "Is not!"  "Is too!" and getting
  precisely nowhere, as they have for centuries.  
                    
                                                   ---Peter