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From: jat@hpsemc.HP.COM (Joe Talmadge)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: Moral blindness
Message-ID: <9440034@hpsemc.HP.COM>
Date: 18 Jan 90 17:53:22 GMT
References: <7788@unix.SRI.COM>
Organization: the Airborne Toxic Event
Lines: 102

Where I don't capitalize the "o" in "objectivist", this means I am
talking about objective theories in general rather than Objectivism in
particular.

david director friedman writes:
> 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.

Looks okay here.  But note that you're using the objects of the senses to
make your conclusions here.  You can see and touch the glass.

> 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. 

This is not my impression at all.  Some people I've met from the
United States often come to the same normative conclusion, but even
within the United States there are huge differences in moral opinion.
People from different areas of the world often come to radically
different conclusions.  This, I think, is to be expected. After all,
we are products of vastly different societal, historical, personal,
educational, religious, and other influences, and these all affect
ethical judgements to some extent.

> 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.

I'm not sure how much weight can be given that argument.  Many of
these judgements of our capitalist are made *after* some principle
has been judged ethical.  When I first started seeing classical
liberal principles as "ethical," suddenly the capitalist took on a
whole new light for me.  My view of the capitalist was changed by my
ethical views, not vice versa.

The socialist and the libertarian seem to have vastly different
ethical views.  The socialist seems to think equality of outcome, for
example, is "good"; the utilitarian classical liberal thinks that
happiness is good; and the libertarian thinks that conformance to a
self-evidently good principle (the NCP) is good.  I think there are
different ethical views involved here.

> 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.

Your observation is essentially correct -- I can argue that no
particular objective moral theory is correct, and even if I argue the
point successfully, I have not proven that *no* objective moral theory
is correct .  However, Michael Ellis and I *have* been arguing about
whether or not any kind of objective basis can exist, considering that
subjective emotions (pleasure and pain) play such a big role in
ethical judgement [in Mackie's terms, we've been arguing about
2nd-order views, not 1st order].

It may not be possible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there
*cannot* be an objective ethical system, any more than it is possible
to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there isn't a massless
invisible demon sitting on my shoulder right now.  But at the moment,
I haven't seen much more evidence to support the former than the
latter.  


Joe Talmadge		  "They're not calling it a black billowing
jat@hpsemc.hp.com	     cloud anymore."
hplabs!hpda!hpsemc!jat 	   "What are they calling it?"
jat%hpsemc@hplabs.HP.COM   "The airborne toxic event."