I considered taking up harris on his bet, but couldn’t afford the time at the time. I’ve made one video I think on the Harris/peterson debate discussing how they’re both wrong.
I understood as did Durant (or any serious student of mankind) that philosophy no matter where and by whom, is a middle class attempt at justifying alteration of the status quo. The strong rule by law (force), the weak and poor rule by religion(exclusion) and the middle class by persuasion(exchange). And they must since there exist only three means of coercion of others: force, remuneration, gossip(exclusion). Some of us master symphonies of those combinations, and some repeat one note of violence or gossip.
So as Durant said “The only knowledge of man is obtained through history”. And the evidence of history is that what is moral in any group is encoded in the history of their decisions in matters of conflict over that morality.
The reason being that preference and goods are always and everywhere conditionally subjective, while criminal(physical), unethical (verbal-direct), and immoral (indirect) are something we know, that which is preferable, good, decidable, and true, is that which is decidedly not false, immoral, unethical, and criminal. In other words, anything that is not bad is good. So definition of the criminal, unethical, and immoral (and evil for that matter) is trivial: the violation of reciprocity. The definition of preferable is limited to the individual. The definition of the good is known only by consent. The problem is in the manufacturing of consent by truthful means (rare if ever), by suggestive and obscurant means, by fictionalist (see SEP for “Fictionalism”) means, or by deceitful means.
When people claim something is moral or not they are simply trying to coerce people to spend opportunities, thought, time, effort, and resources on one preference or possible good (or possible bad) versus the ones that they spend them on at present under the promise that an alternative investment will provide higher returns than the current investment.
At any given time, given the geography demographics, means of production distribution and trade, institutions, current knowledge, and limits of current language, those opportunities that we might seize by the transfer of investments from current returns to new possible returns, different such that while moral actions are universal, choosing moral actions with high return is extremely difficult.
(a) First, to avoid sophilsms due to grammatical imprecision let’s separate actions vs consequences vs externalities, vs unintended externalities. We have the ability to make judgements at any point on that spectrum. And it is quite difficult to find answers that satisfy the entire spectrum.
(b) second, propositions can be measured by decidability, possibility, cost, rationality of choice, consequence, externality, and unintended externality.
(c) third, propositions are decidable, cardinal(measurable), and ordinal by triangulation. It takes quite a bit of skill to decide by ordinality in high causal density.
(d) fourth, let’s look at how we already measure morality. *in every civilization, state, polity, tribe, clan, and even family, we resolve conflicts by tests of reciprocity.* If we look at every moral code, every legal code, the test is reciprocity. The difference between orders is (i)
(e) The science is pretty clear in all disciplines that “stress- without-breaking” (competition) produces the optimum in all life including humans, and that caretaking by the continuous reduction of stress does the opposite. But this is not intuitive. It is counter intuitive.
(f) the science is pretty clear that of the three means of persuasion, each reflects the reproductive strategy: i) established male force, ii) ascendent male trade, iii) female rejection, disapproval, ridicule, shaming, gossiping and rallying. And each attempts to create a monopoly for himself/herself and his/her allies. But it is the competition between these groups that allows them to calculate possibilities and compete against external forces. Yet the secret of the western VELOCITY in the ancient and modern worlds was that the necessary sovereignty of individuals participating in a militia defense, leaves only reciprocity, the law of tort, and markets in all aspects of life as the means by which to cooperate. Even more so, each of our classes produced a separate literature, separate forms of argument, and separate narratives. The west evolved not first, not best, but fastest, for the simple reason that it *calculates adaptation to change* faster, and as such *gives very little room for the accumulation of rents* that produce the calcification that prevent a civilization, nation, tribe, or family, from adapting to shocks.
in the current era, democratic socialist humanism appears to be spending down all accumulated capital by reversing 4000 years of upward redistribution of reproduction. And the data shows this reversal continues.
So whether something is in fact preferable or good by your measure has largely to do with your intuitive response which is very little more than you reproductive strategy.
We had a perfect government: king as the judge of last resort (via negativa), regional nobility (demonstrated intergenerational families), business owners (largely farmers and merchants) with demonstrated success. And the women, the poor, and matters of the family and norm represented by the church. This created a market for cooperation between the classes for the production of commons, and kept the state out of matters of family and norm. Unfortunately, (a) the enlightenment was in no small part a result of the mobilization of the 50% of dead capital controlled by the church, and the church could not adapt to the darwinian/maxwellian revolution,. So the academy tried to adopt their role by selling unwarranted diplomas rather than unwarranted indulgences,
Philosophy is more of the record of the failure of literary minds, where hstory, the common law, and economics provide empirical evidence rather than flights of fancy – moral fictionalism.
I solved the problems of philosophy that I did, becasue I came through physics > computer science(mathematics) > economics > Law, then worked backwards through intellectual history to trace the errors of each thinker.
The causal chain is rather obvious in retrospect, as the invention of lying (to the self as well as others) using a particular technique given the frailty of colloquial languages.
So no, morality is objective and universally decidable which is why international law is reducible to the single test of reciprocity.
The problem means of testing the morality of a proposition (whether it is reciprocal or not) requires only that we do rather tedious calculations by triangulation. If anyone is subject to reciprocity then it is not in fact moral.
All moral propositions are open to such testing, just as are all other logics.
If we end the means of deceit we end the mans of self deciet. The problem is as always, that we love our deceits. Heliocentrism, Evolution, Markets, and the necessity of falsifying signals, self image, and status to produce the results of those markets are all unpleasant realities upon which our freedom from superstition, ignorance, poverty, starvation, disease, hard labor, child mortality, early death, tyranny and the vicissitudes of nature depend.
Unfortunately, we are more defensive of our status, no matter how false, than we are often of our lives.
Source date (UTC): 2018-03-21 10:35:00 UTC