Theme: Responsibility

SCHOOLING A WELL MEANING FOOL IN THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY

—“You draw a strong distinction between the moral validity of ostracism and the moral validity of using violence. I reject your framework. I think both social and political control require justification. I also think that most people are with me and not with you. …. You’re quite mad, you know.”— Kevin Vallier

Perhaps, but madmen can construct non-feeble attempts at arguments, and mere fools appear not able to.

So I can’t afford to eviscerate anyone who engages in this many errors, but I’ll take a moment and invest it in your intellectual future.

1) justification, validity, moral justification are pseudoscientific terms, since all justificationism is pseudoscientific. We can ‘justify’ a court’s decision, or we can justify adherence to norms, or justify our reason, but this says nothing about whether the premises of the legislation, the premises of the norms, the premises of our reasoning are true. We merely explain the route we took.

2) assuming our initial premise is true, and each of our subsequent operations (reasonings) is true, then there is at least some chance of truthful content in the eventual deduction. In this case you have not specified what defines moral but seek circularly to depend upon that definition through intuition rather than axiomatic declaration. Thereby proving the first ridicule of amateur philosophy: that all discourse devolves into a debate over norms not truths – thereby ‘justifying’ anything we can imagine. So perhaps to you, you questions in this post seem insightful, but to a professional or skilled amateur, they are merely verbal parlor games – full of syllables saying nothing.

3) Polylogism can’t be true. There exist only more erroneous and less erroneous, more biased and less biased, more wishful thinking and less wishful thinking, more suggestive and less suggestive, more obscurant and less obscurant, more deceitful and less deceitful arguments, just as there are only more moral and less moral arguments. So you are not making a ‘differen’t argument, by practicing ‘different’ philosophy, but you are merely engaging in multiple layers of verbal excuses by which to rely upon intuition (taste) and conflate it with truth (testimonial parsimony) as a means by which to justify your priors, in order to either signal others or yourself.

4) As for the basis of morality, we know it: the value of cooperation is so disproportionately rewarding for a life form as expensive as a human being, that evolved from non-cooperating life forms, and retain the choice of cooperating or non cooperating or cheating, or preying upon one another, that we preserve the incentive to cooperate by paying disproportionately high costs to punish cheaters(exceptions), and pay many small costs to invest (buy options) on future cooperation and pay substantial costs (buy options) on reciprocal insurance in times of harm. But that since these costs could be infinite, our investments (of evolutionary necessity) decline with kin(genetic) distance.

(As examples, The advent of Judaism was to prohibit external insurance and investment outside of the tribe as a resistance movement against competitors. The advent of Christianity was to extend investment beyond kin and tribe as a resistance movement against the aristocracy. Islam is a more aggressive form of Judaism. We all seek to increase our numbers. but we do so through various means. Christianity by extension of kinship trust, Islam by indoctrination and status-compensation(bribery), and Judaism by economic parasitism, and gypsies by predation.)

Now, all human groups exist in various geographies imposing various costs and providing various benefits. All groups are faced with more diverse competitors or lack them. All groups have been more or less successful at paedomorphic evolution than others (domestication and civilization). All groups have been more or less successful at institutional and economic and intellectual development than other groups. All groups have evolved more productive or more parasitic group evolutionary strategies. And so different groups evolved different moral NORMS: rules by which to avoid impositions of costs on in-group members, as well as required investments in in-group members. Just as we developed legislative norms which require the observation of certain rules of investment and cost.

So within a group’s evolutionary (survival) strategy, using the groups norms and legislation, it is possible for any given moral norm, or legislative rule, to be objectively moral or immoral, just as it is possible for any group’s evolutionary strategy to be objectively moral or immoral. And it is common for groups to LIE and state that their norms are moral truths, and legislation is in fact law as a means of imposing unquestioning authority on in-group members. But just as group evolutionary strategies, moral norms, and legislative rules are mere PRAGMATISMS, morality and law are mere truths – because they provide decidability ACROSS various pragmatisms-falsely claimed to be truths.

5) So, first we are faced with the problem of falsifying this argument – and we can’t do so empirically or logically. (go ahead and try).

Secondly, once we provide decidability in a domain the problem is providing other means of decidability that survive the tests of immorality themselves: attempted free riding, parasitism, and theft.

And third, you might ask yourself why any attempt at moral argument would avoid accounting for costs except to perpetuate a fraud, just as any other failure to account for costs in any other domain of inquiry can only be explained by attempt to perpetuate a fraud.

6) So you see, my ‘system’ requires only the process we call ‘science’: to eliminate error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, overloading, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, and deceit from our arguments. And one of the necessary means of ensuring we are not engaging in any form of error, bias, or deceit, is the application existential consistency and full accounting, by the operational description of a sequence of actions in objective verse. property(or more accurately ‘investment’), is merely the unit of measure by which we test cooperation.

7) Now if you know any (meaningful) professors of philosophy it is possible that you can use this post to learn something – although most philosophy departments are now categorized with literature, religion, or pseudoscience, depending upon the university, there remain people of calibre to speak with in at least logic and the philosophy of science. And if that person disagrees with me I’ll openly offer to debate him or her. Not that it’s likely since this is fairly simplistic reasoning at least as I have outlined it here.

If your world is a comfortable lie that is ok. plenty of people disliked darwin or newton’s or galileo’s or machiavelli’s or aristotle’s or socrates’ arguments since each of them exposed the frauds of their eras hiding under the pretense of moral norms. And I do not expect you to enjoy the fact that I’m demonstrating that the (antique) argumentative technique you are using is one of those fraudulent moral norms evolved to use justification in order to make the fraudulent claim that a norm or legislative rule is either ‘true’ or ‘moral’. But that is what you are doing.

Morality: the science of cooperation, is no different from any other science, other than it is dearer to us, and makes us more uncomfortable.

Precisely because cooperation is so valuable to us – and so expensive to obtain. That we fabricate all sorts of lies to encourage it, as well as norms and legislation.

What a lovely web of lies we weave.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

(PS: when did it ever matter how many people believed something? Last I knew, more people on earth believed it was flat. Truth isn’t a democratically determined property.)