2008-04-21 - Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

[mindstalk]

"(5) By (4b) and (3b), someone who is not persuaded by valid arguments appealing to empathy is not persuaded by valid arguments appealing to cogent premises."

Or they don't share the premise of empathy, which you can argue is insane, though only from a normative humanocentric perspective. Also your language is ambiguous: do you mean "is not persuaded by SOME valid argument" (true, in your set up) or "is not persuaded by ALL valid arguments" (sounds more insane, but is false.) (more precisely, "is persuaded by NO valid arguments")

But yeah, I think the basic problem is that you've admitted two potentially conflicting premises, hedonism and empathy. What if someone acknowledges that the empathy argument has some validity, but is not persuaded because of overriding hedonism? Hell, they can modify your structure, and say "someone who is not persuaded by valid arguments appealing to hedonism is etc." and thus insane.

And then there are all the situational modifiers: having little resources rationally means you put a higher value on getting what you need, boosting 'hedonism' (we're not using it standardly now; utility perhaps?) over altruism/empathy, since if you don't you die. And there's the behavior of the person you're being asked to be empathic/altruistic for, and also how your behavior will affect witnesses, toward yourself and in general. In an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, being nice to a consistent defector is arguably quite irrational, for example.

[BloodHenge]

Hell, they can modify your structure, and say "someone who is not persuaded by valid arguments appealing to hedonism is etc." and thus insane.

Well, there's an old joke that handles that one...

Patient: Doc, when I do this it hurts.
Doctor: Then stop doing that.

[Forrest]

I think what I disagree with is 3b, or maybe it's just that 4b is incomplete.

If it's 3b, then you haven't separated prescriptive arguments based on obligation from prescriptive arguments based on profit. In my opinion, a rational moral person is more often swayed by obligation, while a rational immoral person is more often swayed by profit.

So, would you agree or not, that a moral person holds the well being of others to be intrinsically good, a goal worthy of pursuing just for itself (and thus a rational moral person will be swayed by appeals to the well being of others), whereas an immoral person does not (and thus would not be swayed by such appeals)? If you do agree, then we have no disagreement on 3b; rather, moral and immoral people disagree on 4b. And since you are, I presume, a moral person, then you should agree with 4b, except it doesn't appear you quite understood what I meant by it...

If it's 4b, then you haven't addressed what happens when hedonism conflicts with altruism. In my opinion, a rational moral person places more weight on altruism, while a rational immoral person places more weight on hedonism.

Hedonism is not necessarily egoistic. An altruistic hedonist is concerned about satisfying the appetites of everyone. That's what I'm getting at. A rational altruist would be swayed by arguments of the form "it would be bad if x happened to you, so it's bad if x happens to him", and a rational hedonist would be swayed by arguments of the form "x hurts, therefore x is bad", so a rational altruistic hedonist would be swayed by arguments of the form "it would be bad if you were hurt, so it's bad if he is hurt, and x hurts him, therefore x is bad". Though, aversion to pain is not the only appetite; substitute other phrases as necessary to fully flesh out the hedonistic argument form.

Also, in response to mindstalk: there are degrees of rationality and therefore sanity. You are rational or sane to the extent that sound arguments persuade you; so, inasmuch as you are not presently being persuaded by a sound argument, you are not presently being rational or sane, and inasmuch as you are not generally persuaded by sound arguments, you are not generally rational or sane.

[BloodHenge]

Sorry about the delay. I didn't mean to drop out of the conversation; I just missed this earlier.

I think what I disagree with is 3b, or maybe it's just that 4b is incomplete.

If it's 3b, then you haven't separated prescriptive arguments based on obligation from prescriptive arguments based on profit. In my opinion, a rational moral person is more often swayed by obligation, while a rational immoral person is more often swayed by profit.

So, would you agree or not, that a moral person holds the well being of others to be intrinsically good, a goal worthy of pursuing just for itself (and thus a rational moral person will be swayed by appeals to the well being of others), whereas an immoral person does not (and thus would not be swayed by such appeals)? If you do agree, then we have no disagreement on 3b; rather, moral and immoral people disagree on 4b. And since you are, I presume, a moral person, then you should agree with 4b, except it doesn't appear you quite understood what I meant by it...

Right. From what I can tell, I'm allowing for the possibility that immoral people may still be sane and rational, despite their immorality. I got the impression that you felt immorality was a specific type of insanity, on the grounds that they're not swayed by prescriptive arguments based on altruism.

Hedonism is not necessarily egoistic.

I wasn't aware of the destinction between egoistic hedonism and altruistic hedonism at the time I wrote that. So it appears that the disagreement once again boils down to whether or not altruism is a necessary condition for sanity. (And I'm comfortable disagreeing about it, as long as we understand where the disagreement lies.)

[Forrest]

Right. From what I can tell, I'm allowing for the possibility that immoral people may still be sane and rational, despite their immorality. I got the impression that you felt immorality was a specific type of insanity, on the grounds that they're not swayed by prescriptive arguments based on altruism.

Precisely. My argument, concisely put, is that "inasmuch as someone is not persuaded by valid arguments appealing to cogent premises for justification (i.e. sound arguments), they are irrational, and thus insane". You seem to have agreed with that much thus far. You also seem to agree that the ultimate cogent justifications for descriptive arguments are self-evident truths, those being those truths based on the senses or logic; and that the ultimate cogent justifications for prescriptive arguments are intrinsic goods, those being those goods based on hedonism or altruism. So then, just deduce from those premises...

- Inasmuch as someone is not persuaded by valid descriptive arguments appealing to the senses (e.g. "but look! it's right there in front of you!"), then they are irrational and thus insane.

- Inasmuch as someone is not persuaded by valid descriptive arguments appealing to logic (e.g. "but if that was so then there would be a contradiction!"), then they are irrational and thus insane.

- Inasmuch as someone is not persuaded by valid prescriptive arguments appealing to hedonism (e.g. "but that will hurt you!"), then they are irrational and thus insane.

- Inasmuch as someone is not persuaded by valid prescriptive arguments appealing to altruism (e.g. "but you wouldn't like it if that happened to you!"), then they are irrational and thus insane.

It seems like you accept the first three conclusions, but deny the fourth.
But to deny that fourth conclusion, you logically must deny either:
- that altruism is intrinsically good
- that being intrinsically good makes something a cogent justification for prescriptive arguments
- that "rational" is equivalent to "persuadable by sound arguments"
- that "sane" is equivalent to "rational".

But it doesn't seem like you want to deny any of those, so I don't see how you can rationally deny the fourth conclusion above.

[BloodHenge]

But you still haven't addressed the potential for conflict between altruism and egoistic hedonism. Both are potentially cogent justifications for a prescriptive argument.

[Forrest]

But you still haven't addressed the potential for conflict between altruism and egoistic hedonism. Both are potentially cogent justifications for a prescriptive argument.

There's not a conflict between altruism and egoistic hedonism per se as there is a conflict between altruism and egoism simpliciter; and they are each other's logical opposites, so if we're accepting altruism, we're rejecting egoism altogether. Note however that altruism does not mean complete and total selflessness: it just means a concern for others just for the sake of others, not merely instrumentally for your own sake. You can be altruistic and also have a concern for yourself just for the your own sake, and not be acting egoistically at all. Egoism is the denial of altruism; rather than merely the (correct) position that you are valuable for your own sake, it is the (incorrect) position that others are not intrinsically valuable for their own sakes. So you can be concerned for yourself and still be an altruist, so long as you're concerned about others as appropriate too.

But what is "as appropriate"? There's a complex, or at least controversial, ethical question regarding exactly when it is or is not ok to let others come to harm, or even to harm others, for your sake. But then, even if we were to assume complete selflessness, there's also controversy regarding exactly when it is or is not ok to let others come to harm, or even to harm others, for the sake of still further others. But setting that debate aside for now, if we are presuming moral universalism, then there is some correct answer or another to any such question: and as such, sometimes "but that other guy wouldn't like that!" is in fact a sound point in a moral (prescriptive) argument, and other times it is a fallacious (unsound) one. And to the extent that someone is not being persuaded by sound points, or he is being persuaded by fallacious ones, he is being irrational.

I did not mean to list two separate, possibly contradictory bases of appeal, but two complementary ones: a single moral standard defined by two sub-standards; just as reason and the senses are not two possibly contradictory bases of descriptive arguments, but work together to define one single standard of rational empiricism.

In short, forget about my two separate points of hedonism and altruism and just go with moral universalism: there is one correct answer to every prescriptive question; and sometimes those answers appeal, justifiably, to the intrinsic worth of other people. And if someone is not persuaded when someone makes a valid argument appealing to those proper justifications, then he is being irrational. (And likewise, if someone is persuaded by an unsound appeal to those altruism - say, persuaded to murder an innocent person for the sake of some large number of other innocent people [let us presume that that would be wrong] - he is being irrational as well).

[BloodHenge]

Well, it's looking like your definition of morality could be expressed as "the pursuit of intrinsic good", or something similar. If that's the case, then your logical deduction from the previous page doesn't conclude that morality is a necessary condition for sanity; it assumes that morality is a necessary condition for sanity. Intrinsic good would indeed be a cogent premise for a moral argument, but not necessarily for a rational one. The fact that you separated intrinsic good from self-evident truth implies that rationality and morality are likewise separable.

I suppose morality would necessarily be rational if it could be demonstrated that moral behavior has greater instrumentality than immoral behavior. However, if that were the case, any argument based on intrinsic good could be reformulated as a logically equivalent argument based on self-evident truth; either intrinsic good or self-evident truth would be redundant.

On the other hand, suppose instrumentality is independent of morality. Now, a rational person has a choice: Do I do what benefits me, or do I do what's right? And that choice is what it comes down to. I don't like the idea that immorality is a type of insanity, because that implies that immoral people do not have a choice. It feeds into the so-called culture of victimization that's been developing in recent decades, relieving people of the responsibility for their own actions. I just don't like the idea of a world where there's no need to celebrate heroes or punish villains because none of them were capable of acting in any way other than as they did.

[mindstalk]

"that altruism is intrinsically good
- that being intrinsically good makes something a cogent justification for prescriptive arguments"

Yeah, I'd deny the pair of statements. Or more specifically, the very concept of "intrinsically good".

[Forrest]

Well, it's looking like your definition of morality could be expressed as "the pursuit of intrinsic good", or something similar.

I don't see how it could be otherwise; "moral" is to "good" as "real" is to "true". Reality is that which is in accordance with all truths; morality is that which is in accordance with all goods.

If that's the case, then your logical deduction from the previous page doesn't conclude that morality is a necessary condition for sanity; it assumes that morality is a necessary condition for sanity.

No deductive argument ever tells you something that wasn't already there in the premises; they merely make it clear that something is in fact there in your premises. I'm not starting from the premise that morality is necessary for sanity, I'm starting with the premises that (1) sane = rational, (2) rational = persuadable by valid arguments appealing to cogent premises, (3) the ultimate cogent premises of sound prescriptive arguments = the basic or intrinsic goods, and (4) that some altruistic concerns are basically or intrinsically good. My argument just shows that "altruism is necessary for sanity" is contained within those premises. All deductive arguments work like that; they never tell you anything new, they just make clear features of your premise set that you may have overlooked.

Since 2 and 3 are pretty much analytic (by "rational" we just mean "persuadable by sound arguments", and by "intrinsic good" we just mean "good for its own sake, needing no further justification or argument" and therefore "the ultimate justification of any sound prescriptive argument", as a "prescriptive argument" is an argument that "this is good, this is what you should do"), any argument we have is either going to be about premises (1) (whether sane = rational) or premise (2) (whether altruism is intrinsically good), or about my inferences from those premises.

Intrinsic good would indeed be a cogent premise for a moral argument, but not necessarily for a rational one. The fact that you separated intrinsic good from self-evident truth implies that rationality and morality are likewise separable.

By "intrinsic good" I mean the same thing as "self-evident moral truth" [*] - some goal which is obviously to be pursued for its own sake, something the value of which no argument should be necessary to prove.

I think we covered this before, and I asked whether you consider rationality to include a behavioral aspect; whether you can be irrational because your basic objectives are wrong, such as if you felt compelled to hurt yourself, or if you were a sociopath and felt no concern for the well being of others. I think you agreed that those two cases do count as irrationality or insanity; I'm merely arguing that less extreme cases count as less extreme irrationality or insanity.

I also think I briefly mentioned this thought experiment before, but I'll state it again in more detail: imagine you were to build an intelligent robot with perfect information-processing ability, the ability to observe the world and infer facts about it, to speak fluently in human languages, read books, and so on and so forth - but this robot was not programmed with any imperatives, it had no inclination to do anything, or to cause anything to be done or not done. It is extremely intelligent, capable of great feats of logic and pattern recognition and so forth, fully aware of its surroundings - but utterly unconcerned with them. You could start disassembling it and it would acknowledge this and observe you doing it and predict the consequences of it and not care whether or not you went through with it, just as much as you would expect an amoral robot, like a sociopath, to not care whether someone else was being murdered. But this robot is completely apathetic; it hasn't been programmed even to care about itself, much less others.

Then suppose you were to ask it what would be the rational course of action in such-and-such a situation. I hold that the robot would respond with a question, "to what end?", much like if you were to ask it whether a certain mathematical theorem were true and it would ask you "given what axioms?". "Rationality" in the limited sense of valid inference depends upon some given premises to be able to derive any conclusions. If this robot were not programmed to believe its sensors or otherwise programmed with some basis on which to form its factual beliefs, it might ask a similar question if you were to ask it a descriptive, factual, "is" question rather than a prescriptive, moral, "ought" one.

Thus we tend to use "rational" in a broader sense of not only "validly inferred from some premises or other" but "validly inferred from correct (or in the technical language of logicians, cogent) premises". We mostly all generally agree on at least some of the major justifications for cogent premises of descriptive, "is" arguments; propositions which are consistent with what appears true (i.e. with observations), not just from one perspective but from any and all perspectives (i.e. to any and all observers), are to be considered true, and thus to be believed by a person who is "rational" in this broader sense. We have much less academic consensus on what is to be considered good and thus to be desired, and though I would be happy to argue for my take on that (hint: it's perfectly analogous to the descriptive criteria above), right now I'm just arguing that there is some solution to be reached there (there is a correct answer to the question of what is good or bad and why), and that to form "moral beliefs" [*] by appealing, however validly, to justification other than that correct, cogent one, whatever it is (or conversely, holding beliefs counter to those validly appealing to the correct justification), is just as "irrational", in the broader sense, as forming factual beliefs on the basis of the wrong factual justification, or counter to those validly appealing to the correct factual justification.

([*] "Moral belief" = a mental state with the content "I ought to do this" or more generally "this ought to be"; elsewhere in this thread called "desires", which I qualified as shorthand term since that's not entirely accurate, but there's a big philosophical debate between Kantians and Humeans about whether people can be motivated by beliefs or whether they are only ever motivated by desires... and I'm trying not to drag that into this but I guess maybe it's relevant. Oy, this is going to be a long post... So the debate is thus: David Hume and his followers hold fast to the is-ought divide, as do I. That is the thesis that no moral, prescriptive, "ought" proposition logically follows from merely factual, "is" premises; you need an "ought" in the premises to get an "ought" out at the conclusion. Thus, Hume came up with the desire+belief=action system which I've been implying throughout this argument; all actions are caused by a desire for some end and a belief that acting thusly will bring about that desire.

However, Kant's whole basis of ethics, greatly summarized, is that if you would not desire that everyone do whatever it is that you desire to do, then there is some kind of inconsistency or irrationality in your motivations, and merely recognizing this fact should cause you to be motivated to do otherwise, to act in a way consistent with how you would want everybody else to act. I also hold to that. However, as you might expect, Kantians disagree with Humeans, because they hold that people can be motivated by "moral beliefs", which are of course beliefs and thus not desires, and therefore have no motivating power according to the Humean. My solution to this dilemma, since I like both Kant and Hume, is that their arguments are orthogonal to each other. Here, I drew another picture to make this briefer: http://www.west.net/~forrest/misc/humekant.jpg.)

Anyway, returning from that long tangent to the topic at hand... another picture is in order: http://www.west.net/~forrest/misc/rationality.jpg

I suppose morality would necessarily be rational if it could be demonstrated that moral behavior has greater instrumentality than immoral behavior. However, if that were the case, any argument based on intrinsic good could be reformulated as a logically equivalent argument based on self-evident truth; either intrinsic good or self-evident truth would be redundant.

You are still assuming that only self-interested behavior is rational, which is equivalent to assuming that only self-interested behavior is intrinsically good ("intrinsic goods" are those things which you should desire without need for any argument; the prescriptive equivalent of self-evident truths, hence why I earlier called them "self-evident moral truths" - a "moral truth" being a correct moral belief, and see my Hume-Kant diagram on what I hold "moral beliefs" to be). This is precisely what my premise that altruism is intrinsically good is against.

On the other hand, suppose instrumentality is independent of morality. Now, a rational person has a choice: Do I do what benefits me, or do I do what's right?

"What's right" and "what I should do" mean the same thing; "right" and "should" both just indicate imperativeness. The question is "what is right?". So a person might ask himself, "should I do what benefits me regardless of its impact on others, or should I act consistently with a regard for the well being of others?". But that question, which might be shortened to "should I bother to care about other people just for their own sake?", is just the same question as "do other people have any intrinsic value?"

And that choice is what it comes down to. I don't like the idea that immorality is a type of insanity, because that implies that immoral people do not have a choice. It feeds into the so-called culture of victimization that's been developing in recent decades, relieving people of the responsibility for their own actions. I just don't like the idea of a world where there's no need to celebrate heroes or punish villains because none of them were capable of acting in any way other than as they did.

This is why I brought up the free will issue and the punishment issue. My concept of free will is, roughly speaking in a manner keeping on topic, that if your moral beliefs (by my previously noted notion of that term - basically, reflexive or "second-order" desires, desires to have certain simple or "first-order" desires) are causally effective on your actions, then you have free will. That is, if you "believe that you should" desire something, or in other words you have a second-order desire to desire something, and then in consequence you end up desiring it, and thus your actions, being based on your first-order desires plus your beliefs, come to reflect what it is that you believe you should do, then your will is free.

And then, as this relates to punishment, if your brain is such that your moral beliefs are not causally effective on your actions (e.g. if you have some kind of compulsive disorder, and feel desires to do things even while desiring that you didn't have those desires), then you are not acting in accordance with your own will and thus are not "to blame" for your actions, meaning that there's no point in moralizing at you and telling you how bad you are or arguing why you shouldn't do that, because you may already feel bad about it and know that you shouldn't do it, but your moral beliefs have no control over your actions in such a case. However, you are still "responsible" for your actions, inasmuch as you caused them and should be held accountable for the damages, just as you are responsible for harm that you cause by simple accident with no ill intent.

On the other hand, if you are not suffering from some sort of compulsion or other will-depriving disorder, but your "moral beliefs" are still malformed, then you are both responsible in the should-be-held-materially-accountable sense, and "to blame" in the should-be-moralized-at-to-get-you-to-change-your-behavior sense. However, if you are ultimately unresponsive to all sound moral arguments (valid arguments appealing ultimately to basic or intrinsic goods), and cannot be made by such argument alone to change your moral beliefs (and thus your behaviors), then you are irrational (not persuadable by sound argument), and thus insane. At this point you are, similarly to the compulsive person, not "to blame" since there's no point in moralizing at you (it won't accomplish anything), but you are still "to blame" inasmuch as you did something wrong of your own free will. But it was not from a mere mistake, overlooking some point of view or another, or making some invalid inference; it was because the fundamental way your mind goes about forming motivational states of mind is broken for some reason, and in that case some sort of corrective therapy, e.g. behavioral conditioning or medication, is called for. Even so, you should still be held materially accountable for the damages you have caused as well.

I'm not arguing that "all evilness is really just insanity and thus nobody is responsible for their misdeeds". I am arguing just as much that "criminally insane" people should be held to the same standards as plain old "evil" people as I am the converse. I think "insanity" should not be a get out of jail free card, because then most people would have to get out of jail free if we were consistent about it. I'm just saying there should be one standard. Hold everybody materially responsible for the damages they caused, regardless of why they caused them. That's all the courts need to be there for. Then, if someone did what they did wrong by accident or ignorance, just inform them of how to avoid doing that in the future. If someone for some reason has lapses in their free will (e.g. compulsions), offer to do what you can to help correct that, medically / psychiatrically / therapeutically, but don't bother moralizing at them cause there's no point. If someone's free will is working just fine and they are choosing of that free will to do bad things, then moralize at them, argue why they shouldn't do what they did, get them to see and consider the points of view or the implications of their actions which they may have neglected in their decision to act that way. But if they are totally unresponsive to such sound moral arguments, then they need psychological treatment of some sort, cause they're clearly nuts.

Of course, as a (classical) liberal and freethinker myself, I'm very hesitant to say that people who are "unresponsive to sound moral arguments" in Joe Average Jurist's opinion should be forcibly medicated, since I think Joe Average has a fucked up idea of what's a sound moral argument and what's not. (And yes, this does mean that I think most people are insane to some degree). But then, I guess it's not much worse than saying that such unjustly condemned people should be locked up or have their property confiscated or otherwise be punished for doing what John Q Public incorrectly determines to be wrong.

Yeah, I'd deny the pair of statements. Or more specifically, the very concept of "intrinsically good".

Then you are a moral nihilist.