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From: ellis@chips.sri.com (Michael Ellis)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: re antirationalism
Message-ID: <8161@unix.SRI.COM>
Date: 18 Jan 90 16:22:20 GMT
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Reply-To: ellis@chips.sri.com.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
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[This started in alt.individualism; it probably belongs in talk.philosophy]

> Peter Nelson >> Michael Ellis

>>    You have spoken of a lack of evidence for ethical claims, yet
>>    from what you have said, you sound more and more like some sort of
>>    positivist. It save us all a lot of time if you would tell us just
>>    what you consider to be valid evidence. I asked you once before,
>>    and you did not answer me, so I will ask you again:

>>ME> Just what do you mean by "observable facts we can all agree exist"?

> I would start by evidence of our senses.   That should be sufficient
> for just about anything we are likely to encounter on this newsgroup.

    Not so. Sense data positivism fell by the wayside decades ago, and
    not because it was inadequate as basis for the human sciences;
    it was inadequate as a basis for the *hard sciences*. No amount of
    talk about sense data is equivalent to talk about physical objects
    out there. 

    There is plenty of disagreement about what the senses can report
    and what they cannot: I can see falling trees, but can I see that
    somebody is intending to do something, or that someone has
    malicious intent, or that someone is in pain, or that doing
    so-and-so means such-and-such, or that one ought to do so-and-so
    in such-and-such a social context? Can we see the causes or
    meanings or reasons or purposes or the natures of things?

    This kind of stuff, which is offlimits to proper scientific
    observation, is the basis for everyday interactions between
    people, and it is the raw data for the human sciences as well, one
    of which is ethics. 

> In the unlikely event that indirect phenomena, like the existence 
> of alpha particles of electromagnetic wave phenomena becomes an issue 
> then we can all present the evidence for our positions.   I maintain
> that there is no disagreement about these things among us.

    And you would be wrong by so maintaining: there are plenty of
    mental deficients, cranks, religious nuts, and so on, who are
    unable to grasp scientific methodology or understand critical
    thinking. We immediately disqualify such people from counting as
    "rational observers": they lack the appropriate pretheoretical
    intuitions to be taken seriously.

    Scientific observation is as value ridden as any other activity,
    it is just another kind of social act with its own prescriptions
    about "right" and "wrong" as any other. In order to understand
    what counts as a good scientific judgement, one must get involved
    in the scientific community. Minimally, this means reading enough
    to "get a feel" for the jargon and the scientific way of seeing
    things, but to understand real science one must also internalie
    micropractices instilled in physics and chem labs, such as
    learning to see the right things in microscopes and the right way
    to fudge one's observations and the right way to inflate one's
    efforts to get funding and so on. 

    Just as scientific methodologies prescribe answers to the
    question "How ought we to go about our discipline?", so ethics
    prescribes answers to the question "What ought we do?". Rejecting
    Velikovsky's work due to his violations of proper scientific
    methods is an act of judgement as subjective as any in ethics.

>>me> If it is your point that rightness or wrongness are not
>>ME> scientifically verifiable, I am in full agreement with you. 

> And this is the issue.   

    Then there is no issue at all. "Science", in the vulgar sense of
    the term ("PostGalilean natural philosophy" or "technological
    science" eg: physics, chemistry, biology, etc..) is just the wrong
    tool for determining ethical truth (or anything central to human
    being for that matter), just as the ethics is the wrong tool for
    determining the truth of statements about physics or chemistry. 

    But that doesn't mean ethics is not a science -- a discipline
    devoted to the disclusure of truth -- as I pointed out in a
    previous article. 

> Rightness or wrongness are neither to
> be found in the evidence of our senses nor are they found within
> the framework of some intellectual discipline like science, as 
> even Mr. Ellis acknowledges.   

    I'm not sure I agree that the evidence for ethical truths is
    absent from the senses or not, as I indicated earlier, nor is it
    obvious that the evidence for scientific truth can be found there
    either. Scientific observation is not the same as "relying on the
    evidence of the senses"; rather, it involves the senses only
    insofar as they are regimented according to the prescriptions of
    some conventional scientific practice. We must already share a
    considerable amount of ideology if we are to agree on what our
    scientific observations tell us.

    Secondly, although rightness and wrongness are not evidenced in
    technological science, there certainly are intellectual
    disciplines that are concerned with right and wrong. Ethics, for
    instance. And to a lesser degree, law. These are intellectual	
    disciplines, and they are also sciences in the proper sense of the
    word. 

>>    You're right, of course. Moral values changed. But why? As regards
>>    slavery, it is pretty obvious from reading literature of the time
>>    that this change was largely caused by a general rational enlightenment.

> By how do you show that this "rational enlightenment" is closer to the 
> "truth" than any other viewpoint?  Granted, it is closer to the value
> system of our particular culture.

    I cannot really answer that question, but I cannot really answer
    any number of foundational questions about science either. For
    instance, how do you show that modern science is closer than to
    the truth than voodoo or witchcraft to someone who refuses to
    believe in physical objects? There are many newagers who are that
    incorrigible. 

>>    If it is your stance that one must be religious in order to
>>    issue a universal condemnation of slavery, then you are playing
>>    into the hands of the religionists (and the O'ists, for that matter). 

> How?   I am saying that a religious belief is one that is taken on faith;
> that the believer "knows" it to be true even if he can neither show it
> to you (evidence of senses) nor base it on some more rigorous intellectual
> framework such as science or mathematics, for instance.

    If reason cannot help us to come closer to the truth about what we
    ought to do, about how we ought to change the world in which our
    children will live, about how we ought to treat other people,
    then we cannot expect reason to help human beings come up with shared
    goals to make a better world, then so much the worse for reason;
    it cannot help us with anything that really matters. And this is
    exactly the reason many people I know turn to religion, especially
    once they start raising families.

    And indeed, for a long time, philosophy, the traditional source of
    rational ethical thought, remained largely silent, especially during
    its catastrophic positivistic era when it was seen as the
    "handmaiden of science". Positivists called ethical statemnents
    "emotive grunts", and thus not a fit topic for the reasonable
    person to be concerned with. Many people swallowed that line,
    especially the academics and educators of technology, who puffed
    themselves up over their newfound roles as supposed guardians of
    the only truth available to humans

    It was during this era that Rand appeared; outside of Marxism and
    religion, Rand was one of the few who put forth overtly ethical 
    thought, and she grounded this in human reason, or so she claimed.
    I'm not surprised she raked in a lot of believers. 

>>    There is something wrong with anyone who seriously offers an
>>    "ethical" position that sees nothing wrong with slavery,
>>    infanticide, and Stalinism. Would you prefer a world with these
>>    horrors?

> Here Mr. Ellis seems to be saying that what *I* prefer is a valid
> basis for an ethical system.

    Pretty sleazy. I didn't say anything of the sort, Peter.

>>             It is with intuitions about such things that we come to
>>    philosophy in the first place, just as we come to science with
>>    pretheoretical intuitions about the physical world. 

> ...And here he seems to be saying that *intuition* is a valid basis for
> an ethical system...     

    Again, I didn't say anything of the sort, although I also agree with
    what you thought I said.

    What I said is that philosophy (like any other discipline) must
    draw on the beginner's pretheoretical intuitions about a subject
    in order to ultimately lead him into an understanding of a
    theory and its basis. Without pretheoretical intuitions, one
    cannot even get started. A person who hadn't the slightest idea
    what physical objects were would probably be unable to learn physics.

    But I also agree with your misinterpretation of my words:

    Intuition is the only possible basis for *any* system of *any* sort.
    This is easy to see: If somebody thinks something is true, ask
    "Why?" and keep asking. Sooner or later the regress of reasons
    will end. A mathematician may point to "self evident axioms".
    These are the mathematician's intuitions. Similarly, a physical
    scientist will arrive at the bald assertions about the
    evidence of the senses and induction (or something else of the sort)
    that is unprovable and consequently must be asserted to be
    intuitive or self evident.

    Ethics is no different: you have to start somewhere. For me as
    well as for most people, stuff like Stalinism, slavery, and Nazism
    are pretty good examples of obvious evils. They aren't just things
    that I don't happen to like, they are as close to objective
    disvalues as I could imagine. Furthemore, no matter how logically
    compelling an ethical proof might be, something is just wrong if it
    demonstrates that Nazism might have been OK. 

>>    I don't honestly know how I could justify condemnations of these
>>    horrors to any arbitrary person, I would have to know what a
>>    person already accepted, and then try to work out from there.

> ...And here he seems to be admitting that he has no idea *how* he can 
> construct an ethical system for Everyman.   

    I'm not talking to Everyman, I'm talking to you, Peter. And I
    thought I was honestly admitting that the ethical project is
    difficult as hell, one made all the more difficult with people
    such as yourself who seem to conflate physical science with truth. 

>>    If it is your position that all we can objectively know are
>>    scientific facts, you are correct that we cannot justify any
>>    ethical statements at all. But then, why should we believe in such
>>    a ridiculous religion as Scientism? 

> It is not a matter of "believing" in science.  The scientific method has
> a good track record of producing useful Real World results and offering
> a certain predictability about some natural phenomena.  Moreover, it seems
> to be fairly free of cultural prejudices, i.e., Smallpox vaccine seems 
> to work regardless of your religion or even whether you believe in the
> virus theory of disease.   Ministers, rabbis and priests will all fall
> at a predictable rate if they are pushed off a cliff; I don't ask them
> to "believe in" or buy into science.   Science is not something to 
> "believe in"; it is merely a useful tool which *I* choose to employ
> where I can.

    It matters not one whit whether you worship physics books in the
    privacy of your home or whether you admit nothing other than
    scientifically verifiable evidence as the only sort fit for
    intellectual discourse. Either one is Scientism. Why not own up to
    the fact? You believe in Science.

> Mr. Ellis is another one of those people who "know" what's right, by 
> gum, and expect all right-thinking people to agree with them.  It is
> precisely this sort of "my value system is better than yours" thinking
> that results in laws against gun ownership, drugs, prostitution, 
> pornography, homosexuality, and a lot of other things that true
> individualists prefer to make their own choices about.

    Value judgements have in the past caused evil; therefore value
    judgements are evil. By the same argument: Technology has in the
    past caused evil; therefore technology is evil. Profound, Peter.
    I am on the verge of putting you in my kill file. 

    Now let's take a close look at whose sort of thinking provides
    justification for government imposed loss of freedoms. In a recent
    interaction between you and Phil: 

Phil>It was MORAL to treat blacks, Chinese, etc. as subhuman in American
Phil>50 years ago?
You>  Again, by the standards of the people doing these things, Yes.  

Phil>So in Germany in the 30's and 40's it was MORAL to kill Jews, the insane,
Phil>and anyone declared by the state to be "unfit"?
You> That's right.  By their standards it was OK.

    You have also argued in favor of Stalinism, infanticide, and slavery,
    wherever they are in accordance with the desires of the powers that be.

    To date I have claimed that slavery, infanticide, Stalinism, and
    the Nazism are examples of things that a reasonable person ought to
    be able to conclude are plainly wrong. Prior to that, I argued
    that people ought to settle conflicts by reason rather than by
    force or treachery. This latter claim is about as close to a
    general principle as I can think of to provide a basis for a
    rational ethics.

-michael