Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural?

[Mr. Perfect]

[Rhapsody]

[CgDs]

[Rhapsody]

[I am ST]

Objective morality, is it?

We've been here before. There's obviously such a thing as an objective morality. In fact there are millions of them.

Assume you are looking at the problem from the god-like POV of our immortal descendants, whose minds are to ours as their minds are to an amoeba's, the cognitive difference between us and amoebas being, thus, just rounding error. Some of these godlike ancestors for some reason take an interest in history, and use their virtually unlimited minds to simulate human societies from the dawn of time until some distant future age. Not only that, they simulate all possible human societies.

Now, presented with a set of demands (you could call them outcomes), let's call that D, these historian descendants can look at their exhaustive set of myriad simulations and tell us what set of human norms, laws and beliefs M will get the human society closest to the set of demands (or outcomes)


For example, D1={ maximize wealth, maximize kitty welfare | 21st century tech} (the little bar means "given" or "under the constraints of")
Let us assume that of all simulated societies, M1={Law and order, Weberian Hard-work ethic, Capitalism, Peaceful, Kitty worship, 50% of GDP and land dedicated to cat welfare and hunting grounds} is the best physically attainable solution for D1. M1 is, objectively, the best set of norms, laws and beliefs (aka institutions) for getting to D1.

For D2 = { maximize welfare | nothing but stone tools}
the survey of the simulations will probably come up with a value and norm system M2 remarkably close to that of cavemen.
Perhaps an elite-only welfare maximizing pre-industrial agricultural society will have norms emphasizing above all respect for inheritable property and male-centered hierarchies, similar to those prevalent in the world from the iron age to the early-modern age.


Of course, this only fundamentally pushes the problem to the meta level, since
a) Values and norms play a role in determining the tech level, which determines what solutions are physically attainable (for instance, with early 21st century tech, "simply give everyone 1 million dollars each year without printing money" is impossible because our society is not wealthy enough for a state to haul in that much money for redistribution) introducing some circularity in our model.
b) It does not explain on what basis the set D is chosen. It cannot provide a basis for choosing one set D over another.

Going further, we can ask our divine descendant historian to survey all Ds, perhaps that will give us a few hints. Perhaps there are D-paths -- sets of such demand sets, as what people want from life changes with time, culture and tech level, but with historical path-dependency. Perhaps some D-path end in the gutter, while others survive and thrive to the end of the simulation. Personally, I'd rather be on a non-gutter D-path, but that's just me. No compelling reason one way or another, and no way to tell for sure without the divine descendant POV.

Ok, off to the gym.

[Pantagruel]

It's not hard to find yourself munching on your tail in circumstances like this. If we act in order to realize our ends, and we obtain our ends by acting to choose them, then we must have acted to choose our present ends in order to realize some earlier and more fundamental ends. But in turn, we can only have obtained those ends by acting to choose them in order to realize other, even deeper ends, and so on ad infinitum. This obviously does away with that theory of human action.

[I am ST]

<from a coffeeshop>

Pantagruel, Thank you for your reply. That is a fundamental problem with any maximin morality theory. However, easily solved by positing that there is an initial fundamentally external goal imposition process at T0. Our cavemen ancestors did not have the information environment we have now, and survival/reproductive constraints elicited a selective response of survival/reproductive-oriented goals.

As the information environment was improved by the rising tech level, these constraints became marginally less binding, allowing for a shift from the equalitarian sharing morality of hunter gatherers to the elite-plebes morality of the agricultural ages, and then again towards the self-expression centered values of today. Post-industrial societies have hit post-scarcity for a majority of the population, effectively removing the survival/reproductive constraints. Without these constraints, considerable drift and mutation in human value sets can be expected. For now, the shift is more superficial (dress and community --- Aferim's pet peeve furries, lizzrdgrrl's cosplay, goth, Yukie's fundie creationists, etc), but with time there will be corresponding shifts in more fundamental values as well.

<now seriously staying off this addiction of foruming>

[CgDs]

[CgDs]

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

[Pantagruel]

ST,

I'm afraid that this rabbit hole looks even deeper. Let's admit that we are given an initial set of ends at birth. Is it possible for us to subsequently discard this set of ends and choose new ones? Remember that we act in order to better realize our present ends. This implies that the possibility of our choosing new ends depends on the nature of our initial set of ends: we may do so if and only if we may better realize our initial set of ends by acting to discard them and adopt some other, fundamentally different set of ends.

There's a corner case where this is clearly so, namely, if our initial set of ends includes the end, "Adopt a new set of fundamental ends," or, "Discard your present set of ends." But that doesn't seem likely, or even sane. The questions this raises are, in the first place, whether or not there exist more plausible sets of initial ends that can likewise be realized by an action that discards and replaces them, and second, whether our actual initial sets of ends were indeed among these.

[lzzrdgrrl]

[Ibrahim]

Not to sound like a lunkhead here, but I don't see how this could ever be settled, or what difference it makes. People professing both views have historically proven to have equal propensity for exemplary or awful behavior.

[Colonel Sun]

[Colonel Sun]

[Hoosiernorm]

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/New ... le&id=5305

Do not have the transcript for this debate as of yet. This is one of his earlier debates on the same subject with quite a bit of his argument. The Harris Debate was better by far and will try to find a transcript of it when it becomes available.

[Pantagruel]

A sophisticated Harrisian science of morality - which is to say a sophisticated body of theoretical knowledge about the deep causes and possibilities of individual and collective human happiness - could and would be used by incorrigibly cruel people to cause mass misery.

[Rhapsody]

[Rhapsody]

Thought I posted it already..so again:

[Hoosiernorm]

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Morals may be supernatural in origin but you'd be hard pressed to show that the ethical framework behind them [which seems to be the discussion here] is as well. Though I wouldn't rule out that there are ethical frameworks out there that are more universally applicable.

[Hoosiernorm]

[Tinker]

[Hoosiernorm]