Morality

Our perception of causality is intuitive. It's not based on rational deductions.
Causality is the only presumption science makes. Everything else is of little significance.

You don't have a choice in how you deal with the absence of agency.

>what are the most solid arguments for affirmation of being/morality, in face of modern empirical research seeming to undermine free will?

Well, most professional philosophers are compatibilists, so it's not clear that science seems to completely undermine free will. And to add on to that point, most professional philosophers are also moral realists, aka believe in the existence of mind-independent morality. Plus, personally I'm not even sure hard determinism precludes the existence of morality.

>arguments
only rationalists care about arguments

>only presumption
rtard

Is moral realism opposed to moral subjectivism?

k

Yes. Moral realism isn't simply the position of believing morality exists, but that it exists in a mind-independent way. Since moral subjectivism claims morality is true depending on what a subject believes, this makes it mind-dependent, and therefore a subset of anti-realism. Anti-realism also encompasses views claiming moral properties don't exist at all.

Morality is defined by biochemical factors as is our perception of reality but the influence of those biochemical factors differs for each individual. Thus morality is both "real" and subjective. A subjective experience can also be empirically confirmed and measured. Subjectivism and realism shouldn't be regarded as mutually exclusive. It's anti-productive.

Most professional philosophers are pants-on-head retarded Platonist dickbags.
Science is the ideology of tools.

Science IS a tool, not ideology.

Biochemistry is not real, reality is not real. You also don't understand ethics or philosophy of science (or science, at that).
No, it's ideology. Get yourself straight you ideologue.

Whatever you say, oh, Enlightened One.

I'm not the Platonist here, you are.

Well, that's why I made sure to explain 'moral realism' doesn't simply mean 'morality is real,' but mind-independently real. In other words, there exist moral facts that are true regardless of what anyone believes about them, like 1+1=2 is a mind-independent mathematical fact (well, depending who you ask, but this statement is far less controversial on the internet than the same one about moral facts). If morality is 'defined' or contingent upon one's mental properties, then it's not realism. As for your explanation of what morality is, you'd need an argument to back up your beliefs.

>Most professional philosophers are pants-on-head retarded Platonist dickbags.

Depends what you mean by 'Platonist,' I guess,' but this isn't true. If you mean to use it synonymously with 'realism,' then yeah, that's what I said, but it's not necessarily a retarded position.

Platonist? What in the world are you talking about?

>but it's not necessarily a retarded position.
Yes it is.

>If morality is 'defined' or contingent upon one's mental properties, then it's not realism.
It's not "mental" properties. It's "physical" properties (of the mind). In the first place why would you assume that the mind is not contingent on reality.

How so? I'm an anti-realist myself (though I find myself explicating and defending moral realism on here and elsewhere because so many laymen think the proposition 'morality isn't real outside of being a social construct and/or the product of our evolution to facilitate survival' is a settle matter in philosophy), but even I'll admit the moral realist side has many robust and compelling arguments.

I knew I'd catch flak from you by only using the word 'mental!'. I was gonna write 'mental and/or physical' but that felt inelegant, and took my chances on you understanding 'mental' in an all-encompassing sense of the brain, intellect, unconscious, etc.

Anyway, the point is you have to defend your assertion that morality is contingent solely on one's 'physical properties of the brain' or however you'd word it because, to the larger point I've been trying to make, it's not such a settled matter as you'd believe.

>what are the most solid arguments for affirmation of being/morality, in face of modern empirical research seeming to undermine free will?
Are you sure that's not just a vague idea you picked up somewhere?

>or at least: how do you deal with the attendant nihilism following the absence of agency?
That's a psychological question, don't shift responsibility to philosophy and theoretical views by speaking in its jargon. Nietzsche did a number on you but it's not too late to change.

How: Remind yourself that you are in control by doing what is good for you and sticking to it while cutting out stuff that isn't good for you. This creates a value system and you won't be inclined to be feeling nihilistic and shit very soon.

>arguments are good
Fuck off you rtard

Maybe it's too much to ask but could you sketch the best arguments for moral realism you are aware of?

hurr psy ants cunt m8

Well, this is a thread about free will, right. In the first place it is impossible to think about morality without the concept of free will. We can't be said to have made a "choice" about anything if we don't possess self-awareness and higher mental functions like rational reasoning.
So thus far morality is contingent on the mind.
Further, the ability to assign value to objects is integral for moral functioning.
In order to make a choice we need to assign value to different options.
So according to your definition of realism objects must possess value in themselves and, well, that is simply not true because of the fact that (a)different people can assign different values to the same object.
Cultural factors can have effect on the value we assign to objects but (b)the mechanism and extent of this is dependent on the biological/physical functioning of our brain.
So thus far the mind is contingent on reality.

Do you find (a) or (b) to be contentious statements and if so explain why.

>like 1+1=2 is a mind-independent mathematical fact (well, depending who you ask, but this statement is far less controversial on the internet than the same one about moral facts).
To me that's hella difficult to grasp and seriously unintuitive. I don't understand why would mathematics be mind-independent.
You need someone or something to evaluate a rational structure like that for it to make sense. You need a mind conditioned in a reality like e,g, ours to recognize two distinct objects which to add up. If there weren't two apples there wouldn't be 1+1=2. But what's the case for two apples being there mind-independent? What is the mind-independent delimitation that makes separate objects, rather than everything being one big unevaluated and unsorted mess?

Morality in the same way has to be a mind dependent structure.

Am I inflating the definitions here?

Fuck off back to Veeky Forums you redditcunt

Sure! Keep in mind like I said earlier I'm an anti-realist myself, so I might not be doing these arguments justice but:

1) Those against moral realism often talk about how strange it would be for these kinds of moral facts to exist without a God (argument of Queerness). However, many of them, especially of the STEM variety, readily accept the existence of epistemic facts/norms, facts about what we should believe, what counts as proper justification, etc., and aren't these norms existing in a mind-independent way just as weird? Therefore, if one accepts the existence of epistemic facts, then it would appear similar types of facts, like moral facts, probably exist in the same way.

2) Huemer's principle of phenomenal conservatism: all beliefs are justified by intuitive 'seemings---it just 'seems' intuitively true that I have two hands or A=A. So if we have intuitions that it is wrong to murder children or even the belief that moral progress is real, then we should trust our intuitions until given a counterargument otherwise.

3) Which leads to the fact that none of the arguments against moral realism are particularly devastating. For example, "people disagree on morality, therefore it's subjective!" or "our beliefs about morality are explainable by evolutionary psychology" either fall apart upon closer examination or don't totally refute moral realism.

Because the concepts of time and space are so universal it's easy to forget that they only exist in the way we know them because of the construction of our mind and are not "objective".
For example you could say "It's a cube" and I could say "It's an infinite set of planes."

Well put. Really don't know what to make of professional philosophy sometimes. It seems to make random jumps in reason like that and call it a valid position (maybe for the sake of practicality or being approachable)?
That's why I'm planning on going to uni for it.

1) and 2) don't contradict subjectivism in any way. I'd like to hear more about 3).
The idea that objects can have value in themselves sounds pretty absurd to me. Can you give an example of that and how it could be possible?

>Well, this is a thread about free will, right. In the first place it is impossible to think about morality without the concept of free will. We can't be said to have made a "choice" about anything if we don't possess self-awareness and higher mental functions like rational reasoning.
>So thus far morality is contingent on the mind.

The problem with your argument here, user, is it requires understanding morality from a subjective, mind-dependent way from the outset. Think of it this way, if I said, "It's impossible to think about mathematics without free will, self-awareness, and higher mental functions like rational reasoning." You'd call me silly and rightly point out "No, mathematical facts would still exist, those hypothetical beings just wouldn't' haven't access to it."

>Further, the ability to assign value to objects is integral for moral functioning.
>In order to make a choice we need to assign value to different options.

Again, if moral facts were mind-independent, then it wouldn't require people to 'assign value' because the value and moral properties already exist.

>(a)different people can assign different values to the same object.

So what? People disagreeing over math and science doesn't automatically conclude both math and science are subjective, it could also mean some people are wrong.

>(b)the mechanism and extent of this is dependent on the biological/physical functioning of our brain.

You're committing the same error you did before. Moral realism includes a distinction between "what we do believe" and "what we ought to believe," and is primarily concerned with the latter. The point I'm making here is, just like with the mathematical facts example, our moral beliefs being continent on our biological/physical make-up doesn't have anything to do with whether those beliefs are correct or if true facts exist elsewhere. In short, a dog's inability to understand and incorporate mathematical facts has no relation to whether those facts are real.

I'll reply once I come back from smoking a cig.

) and 2) don't contradict subjectivism in any way.
contradiction only mattes if you believe in the principle of non-contradiction

>People disagreeing over math and science doesn't automatically conclude both math and science are subjective, it could also mean some people are wrong.
Yes, the people that claim that such filthy ideology is 'correct' are wrong.

Thanks for the reply my man

>1) [...]readily accept the existence of epistemic facts/norms, facts about what we should believe, what counts as proper justification, etc., and aren't these norms existing in a mind-independent way just as weird?
Fuck yes it's weird. Drives me nuts when people think that.

>2) Huemer's principle of phenomenal conservatism: all beliefs are justified by intuitive 'seemings---it just 'seems' intuitively true that I have two hands or A=A. So if we have intuitions that it is wrong to murder children or even the belief that moral progress is real, then we should trust our intuitions until given a counterargument otherwise.
Interesting. Intuitive in the same way as Euclidian geometry, no matter how much aposteriori evidence to the contrary (being the "real reals") gets piled on, right?

So morals are real, in the sense that they structure our reality on a very basic level and we can't change our intuition willy nilly just like the Euclidian axioms just make sense (parallel lines never cross and so on) and just like we can't be going around intuiting a non-euclidian space.

I mean I can get behind that on some level. Calling it moral realism would be a white lie though. More like moral biologism or something.

>3) Which leads to the fact that none of the arguments against moral realism are particularly devastating. For example, "people disagree on morality, therefore it's subjective!" or "our beliefs about morality are explainable by evolutionary psychology" either fall apart upon closer examination or don't totally refute moral realism.
I think this (not exactly explicated) approach is "devastating" but I guess you'd disagree about the definitions

I don't need free-will, self-awareness and higher mental functions to perceive mathematical facts and I only need rational reasoning to "understand" them.
A dog perceives mathematical facts in the absolutely same way I do. it simply doesn't understand them. Understanding doesn't have anything to do with the perception of reality.
I can absolutely not think of or perceive morality without the concept of free will or value nor do those concepts of free will or value help me "understand" morality any better.

Guilt and shame are spooks though and also far from universal.
If one culture feels shame over killing the handicapped and the other culture doesn't, your whole theory crumbles.
It's really more complex than you think.

There is no theory. What feels bad feels bad.
I don't see how something not being universal destroys its credibility. A fact is a fact.

>Guilt and shame are spooks though
But that's an a posteriori rationalization. People sense guilt and shame. Ironically even Stirner himself, who very likely felt ashamed about subscribing to spooks which conflicted with his individualist value system. We don't have to all feel bad about the same things for morals to exist outside of our reasoning.

I get where you're coming from here, and I'm not unsympathetic to the argument, but I'm not arguing for anti-realism here: 1+1=2 is true whether or not there were no objects to represent it. It's a priori true, it's true by definition.

>But what's the case for two apples being there mind-independent?

You think if there were no spectators on Earth, it would cease to exist?

Arguably any argument *for* moral realism is technically an argument against other positions, hah. No but really, I gave arguments solely to support realism. Arguments against subjectivism or other kinds of anti-realism are different ones. What about 3)?

>Can you give an example of that

Well here's where we begin to cross the line from metaethics to moral philosophy itself, which is still filled with vast disagreements as to what exactly moral properties are.

>how it could be possible?

The same way epistemic norms are possible.

All I'm saying is 'disagreement' isn't a good argument against moral realism.

>I can absolutely not think of or perceive morality without the concept of free will or value

Only because you're looking at morality as contingent. My point with the math comparison is suppose if "1+1=2" and "One ought not to murder babies" are both facts in a given world, and person X has no free will and no rational ability to do math. Surely you wouldn't say "1+1=2" ceases to be a fact, then why would the moral fact if it's ontologically the same as the mathematical fact? I guess I'm not quite seeing what your problem is between free will and objective morality is, and forgive me if I've simply misunderstood you, I am pretty high and tired right now.

If you want to call it "morality" it has to be somewhat objective. If it's stuck at subjective bad feelies, than it's not more than bad feelies. There's nothing to deduce from it.

If one man feels bad about killing and another doesn't, following your post, you can't say that killing is good or bad, you can only deduce "some people don't mind killing".
"It's only wrong if YOU think it's wrong (because you have first been taught it's wrong)" is just not saying much.

No it's not. People sense guilt and shame because they are socialized. Children have absolutely no problem hurting each other or crushing spiders until they are told it's bad, and then they cry and feel ashamed because they've been reprimanded, and learn the lesson.

Like I said, in some cultures, it was the moral thing to kill cripples and the elderly. What's moral is a shifting, temporary consensus.

Also, "shame" is an emotion that works to regulate our standing in a social hierarchy. It has nothing to do with good or bad.

>Thanks for the reply my man

No problem! I think charitability toward one's interlocutors and opposing viewpoints is an important virtue, so I don't mind explaining why the opposition believes what they do.

>Fuck yes it's weird. Drives me nuts when people think that.

Some people I've discussed with on the past on here are anti-realists about epistemic norms too, aka there is no objective justification for any beliefs; at least they manage to be consistent!

>So morals are real, in the sense that they structure our reality on a very basic level

Yes. In the same way it's unproblematic that when we see a dog in our lawn we have no problem with accepting the proposition "A dog is in my lawn" is prima facie true, we shouldn't have a problem with when seeing someone get murdered just seems obviously wrong, accepting "Murder is wrong/One ought not to murder" is prima facie true.

>More like moral biologism or something.

Well, think of it this way: eyes and ears are biological aspects of our bodies, and yet the information we receive through them we have no problem accepting as representing some mind-independent 'truth' in the world. Why then is our reaction to morality solely the happenstance reaction of our rational sensibility with no relation to some truth or fact in the world? I'm assuming that's what you were getting at with moral biologism. For what it's worth, a lot of people, some philosophers too, do think universal moral facts are true only in relation to the common/ideal disposition of mankind.

>I think this (not exactly explicated) approach is "devastating" but I guess you'd disagree about the definitions

The moral realist would probably be a mathematical realist too, and respond how I did: that "1+1=2" is true even in a world where no physical objects exist. Math doesn't need reference to any real objects to work. For example, Pythagorean Theorem doesn't refer to any 'real' right triangle in the world, and yet we accept it as true. Regardless, mathematical philosophy isn't an area of my expertise, and the "1+1=2" example is meant to appeal to those who are mathematical realists but moral anti-realists. I don't hold an opinion on the ontology of mathematics personally.

>It's a priori true
Precisely. This proves it's a property of the mind and not of the object itself. It exists independently of your experience of reality.
If morality were a property of the object and not of the mind you would have to learn it, you wouldn't be able to perceive in intuitively.

>Arguably any argument *for* moral realism is technically an argument against other positions
Not if I believe your arguments are compatible with other positions.

>The same way epistemic norms are possible.
Again. A priori knowledge. A property of the mind and not of reality.

> then why would the moral fact if it's ontologically the same as the mathematical fact
Because they are NOT ontologically the same. Our perception of those is determined by different mental functions. If a cat murders her babies is she morally wrong? Shall we send her to court?
A cat would not feel guilt about killing babies therefore it is factually not wrong for her to do so.
Just becuase my mind is wired to perceive as an ontological fact that two parallel lines don't converge at infinity that doesn't mean that if it were otherwise that fact would remain true.

>1+1=2 is true whether or not there were no objects to represent it. It's a priori true, it's true by definition.
Right it would still be true by definition. But shouldn't everyone agree that it would cease to be intuitive and meaningful at all? 1+1=2 would be as true as 1+1=3 depending on the reality-independent axioms I choose for this arithmetic operation, since the axioms are what makes it true by definition beyond intuition. For 1+1=2 to be true in the sense that "it just is" while 1+1=3 "just is not", it absolutely needs an understanding of natural numbers and so on as we are conditioned to do by a mind that makes separate objects a thing in the first place (and probably other preconditions that have to be in place, but for the sake of argument..).

>You think if there were no spectators on Earth, it would cease to exist?
I think it's intuitive that there would cease to be a case for the existence of countable and addable things as opposed to one big puddle of fluctuation.

Thank you very much user. I definitely understand the position better now.

>If it's stuck at subjective bad feelies, than it's not more than bad feelies.
It's not subjective bad feelies, it's objective bad feelies. Feel free to stick electrodes in my head.
>following your post, you can't say that killing is good or bad, you can only deduce "some people don't mind killing"
Yes, and?

>Children have absolutely no problem hurting each other or crushing spiders until they are told it's bad
Children don't develop self-awareness and theory of mind skills until 1+ year of age but even learning in the way you described requires intuitive understanding of good and bad. For example "Mother is angry at me. I've made her feel bad with something I did" requires the child feeling bad for having hurt his mother in some way.

>What's moral is a shifting, temporary consensus.
Consensus is the key word. Murder in itself is not wrong. What is morally wrong is offending someone else. If you feel that a person will not be offended by being killed by you then its OK to kill them. On the other hand if you feel that people would be offended by your bad table manners then its not OK to have bad table manners. It doesn't really have to make sense.

>It has nothing to do with good or bad.
It serves to make you feel you are bad presumably for doing something bad. It's not explicitly moral but it is applicable to moral situations too.

>Precisely. This proves it's a property of the mind and not of the object itself. It exists independently of your experience of reality.
>If morality were a property of the object and not of the mind you would have to learn it, you wouldn't be able to perceive in intuitively.

Sorry, but I'm starting to come-down and have gotten slower and dumber, and can't seem to understand the point you're making here. Could you restate? My bad.

>Not if I believe your arguments are compatible with other positions.

Jeez, you're even trying to counter-argue my joke! But seriously, I'd agree with you in other cases (obviously), but in a scenario like this where the options are virtually binary? Yes, any support for one is, at the very least, a 'counterweight' to the other side of the scale.

>Again. A priori knowledge. A property of the mind and not of reality.

Same with above, I'm confused by what you mean by "property of the mind and not of reality."

>Because they are NOT ontologically the same. Our perception of those is determined by different mental functions.

They can still exist in the same way despite our using different faculties to access them. The point, however, was to demonstrate flipping the switch on a property of Man, like free will, shouldn't make the facts that already exist mind-independently incoherent and false.

Science is whatever will get you funding.

t. Scientist

>But shouldn't everyone agree that it would cease to be intuitive and meaningful at all?

Well sure, in the same way if "One ought not to rape children" was a fact, it would cease to be meaningful if humans no longer existed. I say this because I think we're getting off-topic here, and turning the debate into one about math philosophy I neither have any expertise or interest in. Like I said above, the comparison I used was to tease out inconsistencies in thought in those who are mathematical realists and moral anti-realists, which happens to be the majority on this site. If your points relate to morality, then I'd be interested in hearing it.

You're welcome, user.

Free will is self-evident. All you have discovered is that some scientists are wrong.

>I think it's intuitive that there would cease to be a case for the existence of countable and addable things as opposed to one big puddle of fluctuation.
Follow up to make myself more clear, I hope: Two apples as a mind independent fact doesn't make more sense outside of our intuition than substituting that two-ness by a one-ness, let's call it APPLE, which only comes as one fixed thing but which you and I regularly interpret as two apples.

(Do that ad infinitum until you have nothing but one thing, let's call it KEK)

You get where I'm going with this? We say "hey wait a minute, those are two apples when you atomize this APPLE structure", but I don't buy that this is atomization is real outside of the mind. It is contingent on our mind's thing to structure reality by e.g. counting discernible stuff. We don't count milk as a substance, we count milk cartons or by the liter and so on. But outside of our mind everything is "milk without the carton", right?

>It's not subjective bad feelies, it's objective bad feelies.
Subjective because it differs from person to person, not because your feelings are dubious.

>Yes, and?
If you're satisfied with that, there's no problem. I think most people would have a problem with it though if if you killed their child and claim it was the morally right thing to do because you didn't feel bad while you did it. It makes the word "morality" and all discussion about it meaningless if you claim there is no good and no bad, there's only how you feel about something. It seems to me that amoral and moral become the same thing then, essentially.

>Children don't develop self-awareness and theory of mind skills until 1+ year of age
I'm talking about way older than that, still. The average 5 year old has no problem taking away someone's favourite toy even knowing that makes the other child feel worse.

>requires intuitive understanding of good and bad. For example "Mother is angry at me. I've made her feel bad with something I did" requires the child feeling bad for having hurt his mother in some way
What on earth is intuitive about that? The child merely reacts to being scolded. And I assure you a young child doesn't feel bad because it "hurt the mother in some way", it feels bad because of the very scolding. It's purely egoistical. It's why reasoning with little children rarely works: Just saying "Please stop, this hurts mommy" usually just gets a grin from them. If you tell them "Don't do this, it's wrong", they ask "why?".
Shame and guilt are purely learned. That's the whole garden of Eden thing.

>It doesn't really have to make sense.
Well it indeed doesn't anymore because you just shifted your whole position. First it's "If YOU feel bad, it's wrong". Now it's "If it makes someone else feel bad, it's wrong, even if you enjoy it". You completely contradict yourself.

>It serves to make you feel you are bad
Yeah no, that's not a particularly useful evolutionary purpose. I mean of course that's part of it, but only to the end of affecting you as a social creature. No one feels bad unless they see themselves through they (imaginary) eyes of other people (the point of "hell is other people").

From what I got of your definition of realism in order to be mutually exclusive with subjectivism it has to assume that the property in question (i.e. moral value) is a property of the object itself.
A priori knowledge is intuitive knowledge that is independent of our experience. If is property of the subject and not of the object. If you have knowledge that A is B regardless of whether A exists and whether you have experience with it then there is not way B can be an objective property of A. It is "true" though in as much as you perceive it intuitively.

>The point, however, was to demonstrate flipping the switch on a property of Man, like free will, shouldn't make the facts that already exist mind-independently incoherent and false
If you flip the switch on the property of free will morality is meaningless. As I said, do you hold animals morally responsible for their actions?
Flipping the switch on speace-time perception would make Maths meaningless. Then it wouldn't matter if 1+1 makes 2 or 2000.

I see now, your position seems like a pretty Kantian one, am I correct? Like I said in my other post, though, I'm primarily interested in the metaethical discussion and not so much the mathematical one---are you attempting to link this conception of arithmetic to the nature of morality?

>From what I got of your definition of realism in order to be mutually exclusive with subjectivism it has to assume that the property in question (i.e. moral value) is a property of the object itself.

Sure.

>A priori knowledge is intuitive knowledge that is independent of our experience. If is property of the subject and not of the object.

I'm not sure if I agree with the second part here. Kant's posits his categorical imperative and the resulting principles of morality to be a priori truths, and they certainly can refer to properties of things outside the thinking Subject (i.e. practical reason).

>If you flip the switch on the property of free will morality is meaningless.

Meaningless is one thing, but what I'm getting it is free will doesn't affect whether or not the fact exists anyway. Moral realism doesn't assert we even have access to or can necessarily understand moral facts, but they still exist.

>As I said, do you hold animals morally responsible for their actions?

I don't believe most moral realists would, no. But, again, that only means moral facts don't apply to them and not that they don't exist. That's the distinction I'm trying to get across here---whether or not we should apply standards of morality is a separate question from its existence.

Your question makes me think that you've never read two lines of philosophy in your life, but if you are really interested in this you should check out XXth century action theory.

Wittgensteinians in particular denied that there is such a thing as itentional actions or that actions can be caused by reasons and beliefs of the agent. Check out Anscombe and then Davidson for a possible solution of the problem that bites the bullet of the physical-mental correlation.

>The average 5 year old has no problem taking away someone's favorite toy even knowing that makes the other child feel worse.
The average 25 year old is not better.

>That's the whole garden of Eden thing.
The point of the Original Sin is gaining intuitive knowledge of Good and Bad.

>The child merely reacts to being scolded.
In fact I agree. He could just be responding to a display of negative emotion aimed at himself with shame. Even animals do this. The rationalization "I've made someone feel bad" would require theory of mind skills because morality is a function of reasoning and not emotion. The thing is that in order to make that rationalization you would need the ability 1) to identify and 2) associate your emotional state with the emotional state of another person. Those things can't be learned. They are simply functions of the mind. They are not moral reasoning in themselves but they are required for moral reasoning.
As children grow older they develop their ability to ascribe mental states to themselves and other people, animals and objects and gradually gain the skills to identify mental states though some people never get that good at it.

>First it's "If YOU feel bad, it's wrong". Now it's "If it makes someone else feel bad, it's wrong"
If someone else feels bad that should make you feel bad. That's how it works. It doesn't have to make sense.

>No one feels bad unless they see themselves through they eyes of other people
No, it just means responding with the appropriate negative emotion to a negative emotion aimed at them. Animals also feel shame even though they don't possess self awareness and theory of mind so they couldn't possibly see themselves through other's eyes. The awareness that you are experiencing a negative emotion because you have caused someone else to experience a negative emotion would be morality.

>are you attempting to link this conception of arithmetic to the nature of morality?
Moral realism demands mind-independence of moral facts. But moral facts depend as it seems on intuition or they would be meaningless facts as I talked about with the 1+1=3 example, given some set of rules to make that operation possible and true by definition, yet utterly meaningless.

So there is meaningful math that is directly or indirectly connected to intuition (weird Riemannian geometry is indirectly connected to intuitive physics) and meaningless math.
There is intuitive morality. indirectly intuitive morality and meaningless morality.

So ergo there is no intuition-independent morality that is meaningful.

PS can I ask you why you subscribe to anti realism personally?

>they certainly can refer to properties of things outside the thinking Subject
Let me try this again. If we have a priory knowledge of something then we perceive it according to our mental construct of it, not as it objectively is.

>Meaningless is one thing, but what I'm getting it is free will doesn't affect whether or not the fact exists anyway.
I mean meaningless as in asking "Does a chair have 2 or 3 eyes?"

>that only means moral facts don't apply to them and not that they don't exist
What do you mean "doesn't apply"? You can selectively apply reality? How do you choose to whom to apply reality? If I say 1+1 = 3 then reality doesn't apply to me? On what basis do you choose what is reality and what is not?

>Subjective because it differs from person to person,
it's about as universal as it gets. if "essential human nature" exists, this is it.

Sorry for the late reply, went and got breakfast.

Well, it's not that moral facts 'depend' on our intuition according to moral realists, but our intuition is a reliable faculty of knowledge and is a solid foundation in which to base our understanding and belief of moral facts. I feel like we may be using intuition in different ways here, yours more Kantian and mine as 'immediate understanding' or something similar, but I could be off-base here. Your critique of intuition-based morality is better suited to theories of morality that are founded upon human reason or natural facts, provided I'm comprehending your argument properly (though with the buzz the odds aren't in my favor!).

>PS can I ask you why you subscribe to anti realism personally?

A variety of reasons, but the most convincing ones for me are the argument from queerness and Sharon Street's evolutionary argument: 1) the existence of moral facts just prima facie seems to be metaphysically bizarre---why do these facts exist and how? They seem entirely unlike any other possible fact we are so far familiar with, outside of epistemic ones, but I'm not an epistemic realist either---and 2) unlike sight and taste, which make sense as to why the evolutionary process would progressively refine to reflect some sense of an accurate representation of the world, the faculty for grasping (true) morality seems to have no evolutionary benefit and the notion of it developing anyway over the ages by perhaps being tied in with general human rationality and intelligence seems just as queer as the metaphysical mystery I outlined in a).

That, and I'm a Nietzschean, so realism was never really in the books, hah.

>Animals also feel shame
See, I know from my dog he feels "shame" when he pisses somewhere he's not allowed to. But does he in that moment know he "hurts" me? Or isn't he merely reproducing a learned behaviour, a piece of submissiveness because he expects to be scolded?
I have a problem with calling that "yep, this dog knows good from evil".

Also a problem with your conclusion "It's morally bad to give anyone a grade lower than C+ because otherwise they'd feel bad". It's just not as simple as you make it out to be.

Not sure what you're trying to say. Some cultures feel bad about killing cripples, some cultures don't. What's universal about that?

>Let me try this again. If we have a priory knowledge of something then we perceive it according to our mental construct of it, not as it objectively is.

Ah okay, I think I grasp what you're getting at now, that if moral facts are tied to properties of an object, it is problematic because we are epistemically cut-off from the 'thing-in-itself,' yeah? You might be more interested in Kant's constructivist moral theory. But anyway, the moral realist would say that intuition *does* allow us access to real moral properties and facts, e.g. we really can know that suffering is bad, we really can know murder is wrong.

>I mean meaningless as in asking "Does a chair have 2 or 3 eyes?"

Well, again I'd agree the concept of moral responsibility becomes meaningless in the face of hard determinism, but I still don't see any dependent relationship between moral responsibility and morality itself. A person who blackouts and assaults another person may not be responsible per se, but his act is still wrong.

>What do you mean "doesn't apply"? You can selectively apply reality? How do you choose to whom to apply reality? If I say 1+1 = 3 then reality doesn't apply to me? On what basis do you choose what is reality and what is not?

I wasn't very clear, my bad again. I meant what I said above in this post: that the burden of moral facts, in a sense of responsibility, don't apply to them. As in, a dog can't understand what "one ought not to bite a human being" means, so while we might still be able to say the dog did a bad thing, we might not be able to say the dog is immoral if that makes sense.

>I have a problem with calling that "yep, this dog knows good from evil".
I already agreed. Your dog would need self-awareness and the ability to discern and attach value to mental states to do that. Those are not learned.

>"It's morally bad to give anyone a grade lower than C+ because otherwise they'd feel bad"
It's a matter of intent. When you give a student a low grade you are simply assessing their performance, not trying to offend them. Of course, if they feel bad about it you will also feel bad so it's a matter of prioritizing from here on. You can't please everybody. Presumably making the educational system work is more important than a wounded ego. There is no golden rule or something. You have to make a decision depending on the situation.

Those compulsions are a mental zoetrope of faces with nobody behind the masks. Absolve yourself of all desires and fear outside your being and you will feel your morality cradle your humanity.

What is the notion of free will to someone who ceases to question theirs? It is a curtain blowing in the wind--just as willing as is willed.

When you have have found yourself in a clash of will, where push and pull collide, you'll realize free will is the only thing you have; for a choice can be made at the cost of all choices should it be desired so.

Well what's actually your position on what's good and bad?
First it was
>It's bad if it makes me feel bad
Then it was
>It's bad if it makes someone else feel bad
Now it's
>It's bad if you WANT to make someone else feel bad

I mean, your conclusion seems to be "none of these, you have to make a decision depedening on the situation" but that's not exactly saying much. I mean everyone has a gut feeling about stuff but the whole pursuit is about getting more than that.

>the moral realist would say that intuition *does* allow us access to real moral properties and facts
What is the mechanism by which we perceive a priori the objective properties of objects according to realists?

>but his act is still wrong
According to you. What if I don't think it's wrong? Reality doesn't apply to me?

>in face of modern empirical research seeming to undermine free will?

First off, will is neither free nor unfree. These are human prescriptions of something that is inhuman. That is what Nietzsche thought on this subject, there is a passage that says exactly this with nothing up for debate.

Second, morality really has nothing to do with the discussion of free will, unless you're a psychopath trying to rationalize your lack of empathy. But even to be a psycho trying to rationalize that implies that somewhere, you sense the discouragement in your behavior and its negative effects from those around you, and you want to reconcile that with your own ego in some way that protects it, which would be an act of moralizing.

Morality is a code of right and wrong. Everyone has one. Some people are given one, others create their own. They are all emotionally and intellectually based.

1.It's bad if it makes me feel bad
That's basic reward/punishment.
2.It's bad if it makes someone else feel bad
That's what they'd call empathy. It loops back into 1. A special case so to say.
3.It's bad if you WANT to make someone else feel bad
That's moral reasoning. It stacks up on 1 and 2. A higher instance.

Yeah, in most social situations it's better to use 3. so you don't end up looking like an autist, but it's not always all that helpful honestly.

I mean yeah, those are the guidelines people use in their gut feeling. It comes down to golden rule behaviour. But then you're back to step 1 - WHY.
Which you originally answered with "because it makes me feel bad". Your argument is one big petitio principii.

>What is the mechanism by which we perceive a priori the objective properties of objects according to realists?

Intuition, rationality, teleology. From the first time I answered a question of yours regarding the 'moral properties of objects' and its relation to moral realism, I've been interpreting your use of 'objects' in a very broad sense, basically anything external to one's own mind including facts about the world.

side note: I've been going through some of the literature on the subject during this long discussion and I should inform you while "mind-independence" is a probably the most common definition of realism (even Kant's constructivist deontology wouldn't count as realist under this definition), there are those who include some forms of mind-dependent realism along with some a posteriori theories. The points I've been making are pretty similar to explaining those as well.

I had an argument? What was it again?

What I'm trying to say is that our perception of good and bad is intuitive so of course it's gonna come back to this simple statement because it's intuitive.
A is A.
B is B.
Good is Good.
Bad is Bad.

There are biochemical reasons for you to feel the way you do.
There are evolutionary reasons for those biochemical reasons.
But I can give you no rational reasons why feeling good feels good because there are none. It just does.

avoiding the ''feel bad'' only matters to people who care about displeasures and pleasures, which are called hedonists, because those people love to personalize what they experience through the senses. Once you have no longer faith in hedonism, then it does not matter whether you feel bad or not. And once a person tries to stop caring about sensuality, it does not matter whether somebody is making her feel bad or not. But normies are too much hedonists to understand sensuality and go beyond it, to the point that they claim that making people happy is making people avoid displeasures and giving them free goods, services and opportunities to fulfill their desires.

You just have a very narrow definition what reward and punishment means.

it is actually this personalization of the experience that makes people unhappy. Hedonists believe that, from the good part of what they experience, they can remove the bad part of what they experience. This is not the case and the way to stop being miserable is the throw sensuality away.

no it is normies who think that non-physical pleasures are not sensuality, whereas it remains part of it. Normies love to claim hedonism is just through the 5 senses, but it is not. Imagination or intellect is part of it and it too.

Well no, now you're just straying again.

If I called my friend a faggot out of fun and without my knowledge a gay man overhears it and is sad, nothing happens in me biochemically. Still, most people would regard what I did as morally wrong.
Actions have moral implications regardless of what we feel.

People who killed crippled babies in ancient times didn't feel bad, yet today, we consider those actions immoral. There's more to it than hormones.

>rationality, teleology
How are those related to perception?
>intuition
Well,perception kind of implies intuition. I mean if something is "a priori" knowledge it is already in our head even before we knew of the object. How did we gain that knowledge and how do we know that the object actually possesses such property "objectively"?

>There are biochemical reasons for you to feel the way you do

Morality is also influenced by economic, political, and social circumstance. These morals are enforced and passed down through religion for the good of society, until it just becomes standard. Killing nowadays is considered a horrible offense. In early civilizations, it was seen as a normal since they were ruled by war. People settled disputes by killing each other, and people allowed or encouraged it. Slavery and cannibalism were normalized under the contexts of the time period. Now, these are all seen as evil. How does any of that have to do with biochem reactions?

>Actions have moral implications regardless of what we feel.
Why? If you don't feel bad you are just a jerk and why do you have to bother? It's not your problem. It's a problem of this faggot and his SJW friends right? They are the ones who feel bad, they should take the responsibility.

>There's more to it than hormones
I don't know much about Spartans and their culture but lets assume that they didn't really feel bad. There are people today that feel that killing fetuses is wrong and people that don't. Maybe in 100 years everyone will feel that killing fetuses is wrong.
It's a matter of being able to ascribe mental states. I mentioned something about it earlier. Humans can redefine what "human" means at their convenience within a certain limit.
For example your baby that kills a spider doesn't ascribe a mental state to this spider, but maybe an older child would. There are individual and cultural differences.

I didn't say that cultural and social reasons are not important. Next.

So you do admit that there are "non-physical" "pleasures"?

If you call me a jerk, isn't that a moral judgment?
Also you go against everything you said earlier.

I don't know, I'm out though

>If you call me a jerk, isn't that a moral judgment?
Yes, and?
>Also you go against everything you said earlier.
I don't think so.

>I didn't say that cultural and social reasons are not important

>What I'm trying to say is that our perception of good and bad is intuitive so of course it's gonna come back to this simple statement because it's intuitive.

Is free will an ambiguous term?

Sigh.
Our perception of good and bad is intuitive.
There is a limited number of things we intuitively perceive as good or bad to an extent defined by our individual biological constitution. For the rest of the things we form value estimates in accordance with our individual experience of them and their relationship with the above mentioned valuable a priori things.
If we didn't have intuitive understanding of good and bad and things we value a priori we wouldn't be able to learn because we would have no way to assess our experience.

Individual self-determination or self-fulfillment aren't necessarily predicated on the existence of a "completely" free will, though. If we were to use William James' conception of consciousness, which modern empirical research tends to support, we are faced with a finite stream of desires, true, but there is little impediment preventing us from acting upon whichever we wish.

I figured by 'perceive' you meant 'understand or grasp,' wondering in general how one is able to access moral knowledge. Anyway, a priori knowledge doesn't mean total independence of experience; most definitions allow for the minimum of experience necessary for grasping the relevant concepts for a given proposition. That's how we gain the relevant information required to make a priori judgments, and from there we utilize intuition to ground our justifications, e.g. accepting "Suffering is bad" is justified by intuition alone. Intuition is itself justified by Huemer's argument I've summarized here:

Perceive is "to become aware of". It precedes reason. Understanding is a function of reason.
For example "Feeling bad is bad" is an intuitive understanding that we gain through the experience of something that feels bad but we can't recognize that the object that made us feel bad should make us feel bad unless we have advance knowledge of this.
For example lets say I burn myself on a stove or cut myself with I knife. I learn that it hurts. Does this mean that I had a priori knowledge of that cutting myself with a knife or burning myself on a stove is bad? What I had a priori knowledge of was that pain is bad. "Hurt" is then not an objective property of "stove" or "knife" but of "pain".

...I'm aware, I just assumed maybe you wanted a broader answer because solely focusing on perception qua perception seemed unnecessarily limiting, unless you meant to attack the notion of a moral theory justified a priori, specifically via intuition, but outside of foundational principles and the mathematic example I gave earlier, I never suggested all moral propositions must be reached a priori, although some theories are ala Kant. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make anymore, but on this topic foundational moral facts are discovered and justified by intuition, and we come to know if objects is the world hold relevant moral properties generally through working through and fleshing out the proposition. For example:

P1: All humans have inherent value and rights (justified by intuition).
P2: Not all humans have rationality, intellect, or autonomy.
P3: All humans are experiencing subjects-of-a-life.
C1: All experiencing subjects-of-a-life have inherent worth.
P4: All of the animals we routinely eat, hunt, and perform lab experiments on are also experiencing subjects-of-a-life.
C2: Therefore these animals also have the same inherent value that humans do.

So you asked how we come to first come to hold moral knowledge. We do this by either examining the intuitions we already hold or exploring various propositions that align with our intuitions, and, accepting Huemer's principle, this alone is satisfactory justification for claiming the proposition as factual and true knowledge. From there we probe our what exactly our intuition entails---yes, we readily accept all humans possess inherent value and are deserving of rights, but what about humans? Surely it cannot be possessing traits such as rationality, intellect, or autonomy because this would exclude some humans, conflicting with the primary moral fact we started off with. A trait that does satisfy our intuitions with moral significance and no extraneous assumptions is giving inherent value to those who are experiencing subjects-of-a-life. Many of the animals we eat satisfy this criteria, therefore they also are imbued with inherent value, rights, and moral consideration.

This is to also demonstrate an answer to your second question: we know rights and value are "true" properties of these animals because this conclusion follows from Premise1, which itself was justified as also being a true moral fact by our initial intuitions.