RE: SRC HICKS ON MORAL SKEPTICISM
@SRCHicks Why does the the phone have to ring, with an important call, when SRCH is discussing moral skepticism? ;).
SRCH is one of the only philosophers working that can cover a topic as an educator rather than a persuader. Thankfully.
For Those Interested:
Thoughts (A little deep perhaps):
Morality is one of those topics that maintains my skepticism about not only the past but present and future philosophy vs empiricism and science. Because it appears:
(a) The discipline still too often seeks justification instead of falsification, still seeks the good first instead of the true from which to then derive the possible goods, and still functions as a system of class advocacy rather than the pursuit of truth independent of it. And the civic population follows in the same ‘rut’ as if it’s still 1830.
Yet the result of our industrial, technological, and medical prosperity has not meant convergence even between the sexes but pursuit of one’s instincts and intuitions without moderation to suit the optimum of cooperation between sexes classes, and now, ethnicities with competing group strategies, given the reduction of selection pressures that previously caused the compromise to commensurability by sex and class limits of behavior.
In other words people are diverging in their individual demands for terms of cooperation (morals) at the cost of the capacity of groups to reach consensus and cooperate on the production of commons.
(b) For some reason the discipline of philosophy still has not adapted to the discovery of the first rule of grammar: meaning the requirement for continuous recursive disambiguity; the requirement for complete sentences to do so; and the requirement for operational definitions to do so; and the prohibition on the verb to be to insure so.
Otherwise most supposedly difficult questions are merely exercises in deception by confusion by suggestion using ambiguity as distraction. So we run into the European philosophical version of confucian puzzles for the same reason – if not so absurdly.
(c) Discussing morality – like Socrates’ justice – is pointless without some definition, and once defined is rather easily understood as the standard of weights and measures for solving the problem of cooperation and conflict given the population, its demographic composition, it’s means of survival, and their degree of institutional development. In this sense we vary in moral intuition that sets our demands for cooperation, moral norms that allow us to cooperate across those individual demands, and a laws that resolve conflicts regardless of individual demands or interpretation of those moral norms.
(d) A study of cognitive science explains human differences in moral bias as largely differences in developmental cognitive organization as a consequence of of sexual dimorphism, combined with the degree of genetic load that produces the classes. Why? because all human differences in cognition begin with sex differences in sense, perception, valuation, and cognition. We are, most of us, some admixture between the sexual extremes, but we retain our directional biases in the main – even when our sexual orientation varies from our sex.
(e) A study of demonstrated behavior in economics illustrates that reported preference has little to do with demonstrated behavior, and increasingly so among those most sensitive to social pressure or status signals. It doesn’t matter what people say or argue, only what they do when presented with a choice.
(f) A study of comparative legal systems and legal findings from the local to the international, rapidly reveals that morality like truth is a via negativa.
Meaning that the universal moral laws are those of immorality, and that humans cognitively, out of necessity, produce systems of via-positivas (morals) as standards of behavioral weights and measures, to suppress immorality in the context of their group strategy, allowing. some degree of trust, risk, and production, necessary for increased complexity of production and the resulting decrease in prices of the private and common because of it.
Yet the resolution of disputes between groups at the international level is always reducible to the test of sovereignty in one’s interests (the legal meaning of interests as investments’) and reciprocity (or in legal terms ‘equity’).
Because violations of sovereignty and reciprocity universally provoke retaliation, and retaliation cycles, and it’s retaliation cycles between groups with different norms that caused the origin of morals and laws in the first place.
Thats why the age of religions occurred as the populations began recovering and restoring trade after the bronze age collapse.
Thats also why the age of pseudoscientific religions (the reformation of the abrahamic sequence into the marxist sequence) occurred in response to the industrial revolution and the uniting of the world by the age of sail.
Whenever the scale of possible interaction and cooperation and pursuit of self interest increases the demand for new standards of weights and measures increases, because the populations previously unable to express their wants are now able to, but they have not yet reformed their wants for the responsibilities now upon them in exchange for the opportunity to pursue those wants.
This is why legal reforms are necessary whenever a new class (and previously sex, and now ethnicity) attempts to and is able to participate in a more advanced polity with greater trust, division of labor, and greater responsibility – to demand the same responsibility of the new entrants as the previous entrants adopted in order to create the privilege of that choice.
Hence our present crisis.
The false promise of the end of scarcity, status seeking, natural selection, and evolutionary adaptation – and the possibility of equality without the equal burden of responsibility for self regulation and defense of private and common.
In other words, morality isn’t a question or relative, because it is a via-negativa that is constant while the positiva weights and measures to prevent immorality can vary with the development of the polity.
This is the same for Truth by the way. Decidability is required for some spectrum of action by some spectrum of population. Therefor truth consists of the discovery of decidability sufficient to satisfy demand for infallibility in the context in question: negative consequences by retaliation.
Ergo ‘my truth’ is simply a falsehood, but ‘true enough for me to act and bear the consequences’ is not.
Affections
CD