What are the best refutations of the idea that moral facts cant exist because it's immeasurable?
The most common argument against the existence of objective morality and moral facts besides moral differences between societies is that they arent tangible objects found in the universe and cant be measured scientifically. Are there any refutations or arguments against this?-
Comments (56)
Morals can't be universal since they're essentially tied to the being of humans. But being so, we could argue that there are commonalities in how we perceive the preservation and survivability of being a human, and that there are positive emotions and negative emotions tied to the quality of living as a human. Both to what we do and through the intentions of why we do something.
This is something that Sam Harris has tried (and failed) to do. But there's no denying that emotion plays a big part in trying to form some objective morals. It's just that they can never be a complete set of rules, but rather a range of ought not to and ought to principles.
It may be that we could invent a sort of mathematical equation of value points attached to certain actions and intentions, in which a careful examination of actions taken can measure if the moral actions of someone ended up on a negative or positive side.
But an indifferent, meaningless existence in a deterministic universe creates problems for any objective morals to be found, because they cannot be found. We need to rather invent something based on the sum of our existence and experience. And that takes an honest dedication to examining our existence without holding biases to beliefs outside of measurable emotions and universal human experiences.
Question the implicit assertion that if something isn't a tangible object found in the universe and can't be measured scientifically then it doesn't exist.
It is a fact that the concept of morality is a human human concept. It is a fact that a human infant has no grasp of this concept. It is a fact that all human societies have some moral precepts, which they enshrine in their rules of behaviour and teach to their young. It is a fact that every culture elaborates some variants of basic rules of human interaction; many are similar, but no two are identical.
However, the content of a code cannot be factual, as it consists of dictums, not statements.
"Thou shalt not commit adultery." for example, may sound like a statement of fact, but it is merely an instruction. The speaker does not have any way of knowing or proving that the hearer obeys.
I believe any such refutations rest on the definitions of the three words: Exist, moral and fact. They can be quite elastic as to usage. Not merely the so-called goal-posts in a discussion can be moved considerable distances, but the whole arena may be relocated with the meaning of a word.
Lots of things in the sciences lack a tangible "body" and contain subjective elements. However, we still think we can meaningfully measure them.
For example, most people would agree that "economic recessions," exist, and that they have real causal effects (e.g. construction projects coming to a halt across the world). However, our measurements of GDP growth, real wages, CPI (inflation) etc. are all highly operationalized, contrivances for approximating a measure of a real phenomena.
Even measurements in the physical sciences have a similar "squishyness." Jaynes argued that entropy has an essentially subjective element, and I think he is right here. We have multiple different measures of "complexity," and virtually no one thinks they are perfect . Yet there is widespread agreement that "complexity" does indeed exist as a property of physical systems. Likewise, we might debate how well current IQ tests measure intelligence, but it seems pretty clear that intelligence exists and that some animals have more of it than others.
The existence of incorporeal things isn't the problem then, IMO. People will admit that something like "Japanese culture," really exists in the world, and that such an entity includes moral elements. People will generally also allow that there are facts about what individuals think is good or bad. E.g., "Tom thinks adultery is wrong," is a fact.
Further, they will even allow that, in the aggregate, we can make factual statements about what given cultures tend to think is good or bad. E.g., it is a fact that "most Americans Evangelicals think that abortion is morally bad." Likewise, we can make factual claims about what is "good or bad" given some sort of code (e.g. per the "chivalric code," cowardice is bad this is a fact). Such fact claims hold up even if no one actually buys into said code.
Where people seem to deny the existence of facts vis-á-vis morality is when claims are made about a global moral code.
Here I see two common objections, one serious and one that is trivial.
The trivial objection is that: "your morality depends on where you grew up," and "all cultures have different morals." This is trivial because the same was previously true about how people thought infectious diseases worked, if the Earth revolved around the Sun or vice versa, etc. Yet we do think there are "facts of the matter," about how disease spreads, even if every culture did have different views earlier. Plurality of opinion does not suggest that knowledge is impossible by any means.
The more potent objection is that it seems quite difficult to know where to start in measuring "goodness." Economists come the closest to this sort of thing in their measurements of "utility," but that isn't really the same concept and we have reasons to be dubious about our ability to measure it anyhow. At the same time though, our inability to operationalize things in no way means they do not exist, else we'd have to throw out complexity, life, intelligence, etc. on the same grounds.
"Harm" can be grounded in biological terms at least as well as "life," so that's a start. There are also "facts of the matter," about whether someone finds something pleasurable or painful, and while we can't read minds, there are decent ways to figure these sorts of things out for human beings and animals. Thus, an objective morality grounded promoting pleasure and minimizing pain, or in minimizing harm seems possible.
The problem here is that we might also consider "aesthetic good" important, or freedom as a good in itself. Hegel elevates freedom to the highest good, in part because free, self-determining individuals who are freely, willingly part of a free, self-determining society, will chose to maximize their pleasure and minimize harm to the extent they are able to. A person doesn't choose to be miserable if they can be happy. And they will choose what they think is best aesthetically. In this way, the "promotion of freedom" comes up as a good candidate for "objective morality."
How does this work? We can have a universal definition of "life" right? But life is tied to the being of living organisms. Or a universal definition of parasitism, yet that too is tied to the existence of organisms.
Is the problem that "good and bad" are part of first person experience? Or is it that they are only relative to living things?
Sure, but likewise, if universal morals [I]can[/I] be found, then the universe isn't meaningless. Which one are we in?
I'm not sure what determinism has to do with it. It seems to me that, for a universe to embody meaning and values, it must be determined to do so in some ways. Else how is the meaning in the universe instantiated except by chance? But I can't think of any reason why determinism should preclude universal values. We can imagine a mad scientist who spawns a toy universe that starts off chaotic yet which has a universal tendencies that will cause it to spawn life and then maximize the well being of those life forms. That would seem to be a case of values being instantiated [I] through [/I] determinism.
Morality is a human invented concept that tries to set parameters around behavior and define what is good or bad for us. It can't be universal since you cannot apply morality to a rock floating in space. We can universalize a moral set of rules for humans if we can invent something that applies to all and make sense, which is what moral philosophy is all about. Kant came close, but obviously even that has flaws and the most popular battle in morality is between his categorical imperatives and utilitarianism.
I suggest that we can only define universal morality for humans based on the biology we have and what our biology needs. Our biology programs us to be self-preserving, but we also want to preserve the group. Just like we have our sex drive closely linked to the continuation of our species, so can we find more high level drives of social values that would inform us on what universalized morality we can agree on. For that we can study history, study how people in all cultures value and view actions between people and discover what commonalities exist regardless of invented concepts of religion or other biases.
But none of that can be applied between species. Aliens can only have a moral system that functions based on their biology, we cannot apply our morals to them, regardless of what Star Trek says.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think it's a mistake to link universal meaning to morality. If we find out that there's some integral meaning to the universe and our existence, so what? It does not justify the pain or endorse the pleasure's of past human lives. We can only define morality based on what we have and what we are in the state we are in as existence now. If there was some underlying meaning to the universe that somehow should inform our morals, we would have known those morals by now, because what's the point of some universal meaning if it does not inform that meaning to the inhabitants of the universe so that the morals can be lived by? And no, religion does not inform that because we have too many conflicting religions through history and we have too much evidence of how people skew religious scripture to fit their own purposes to conclude that religion is an invention by people to explain the unexplainable in a time without science.
The only logical "meaning" the universe could have linked to morality was if this was a simulation to form morality. Meaning, all of this, this universe is a simulation with the intent to iterate towards a perfect morality system. That the lack of guidance and meaninglessness of the universe is part of the system, so that the species itself (us), form morality through trial and error. But even if that sci-fi fantasy were true it would still boil down to us having to do all the legwork and we're back at square one trying to figure out a solid moral system for all humans.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Determinism makes our sense of justice problematic. Much our moral thinking relies on ideas of free will. But without free will we have to understand that no one acts without a previous cause, that many people are set on rails towards immoral actions due to reasons of nature and nurture. So without free will we end up with a moral system that relies and focuses on preventing people from doing immoral actions rather than punishment for their actions.
When it comes to universal ideas of meaning, there's nothing that points to any meaning in the universe and therefore we can't talk about morality through such concepts before proving any meaning existing there in the first place. My point is that we don't have to solve those questions since there's a big chance that, due to everything we know about the universe, there's no meaning whatsoever, and because of this we're wasting time as a species trying to verify our morality out of ideas that are irrelevant to our experience here and now. To form a moral system that can be universalized between humans, we need to look at our actual experience and lives that we have, all that we are right now, nothing else. And through that we can extrapolate biological hints towards a functioning moral system for all humans. We just can't apply that to other species in the universe and forming a moral system between species has more to do with accepting the parameters of each species morality system rather than trying to impose our own onto them.
And if the lack of moral facts is true, and the argument is sound, does this make it a good argument? If it is a good argument it refutes itself, therefore it cannot be a good argument, therefore it is a bad argument. If there are bad arguments and good arguments, then truth preservation is good and there are moral facts.
Same can be said of psyches if by universe one here intends the physical universe.
Heres a premise: good = preferable. Good/preferable to whom or what if not to psyches themselves? Seems to me that if there are no psyches, then there cannot be anything good/preferable.
As to objective good, this would translate into that which is objectivelyi.e., impartially or unbiasedlypreferable to all coexistent psyches in the cosmos (who might or might not then be ignorant of what this objective good is). And this postulate of an objective good would in turn be in part contingent on there being underlying universal(s) to all coexisting psyches.
If no such universals to all coexisting psychesto simplify, lets just say consciousnesses herethen no such thing as an objective good. But then, there wouldnt occur such a thing as consciousness as a commonly occurring, or else commonly shared, property of being; i.e., the very word consciousness would then become meaningless, for it would mean something different, and utterly unrelated, to each and every individual [ ?].
By this general account I then take it that there are universals to all coexisting consciousnesses. Which then facilitates the possibility of an objective good.
This only seems to be a problem if we assume:
A. "Uncaused" libertarian free will is the only type of freedom that can make justice coherent; and
B. Punishment can't function as primarily a means of "restoring right," by taking away the benefits of immoral action (deterrence can be important too).
I don't see any problem here as far as compatibalist free will is concerned though. I don't even think "uncaused" free will ends up being coherent. If we're "freely choosing" an act then who we are "determines our action."
Sure. Meaning is always relational. Things don't have "meaning," or information content for that matter, "of themselves." So I agree, it's silly to try to search for a "universal meaning" in this sense.
But there is no evidence of any meaning in the universe? Surely this has to be qualified. I find things meaningful all the time. I assume other people do to. I am in the universe; so are other people. Thus, the universe seems to produce heaps of meaning and values. The fact that an idea of some sort of universal, Platonic meaning that floats free of the world doesn't cash out doesn't mean the universe lacks meaning.
Nor is meaning precluded from being objective. A sign on a store that says "closed" objectively means the store isn't open. That is, the sign has the same meaning to anyone who can read it, even when correcting for differences between multiple perspectives.
I agree with all this. I just don't agree that the parts above preclude "objective" moral standards. Somehow, the term "objective" has morphed from being the opposite of "subjective," into meaning "in itself," "noumenal," or "true." But "objective" just means "the view with biases removed." It makes no sense to talk about objectivity in a context where subjectivity is impossible or irrelevant. An objective moral statement is just one made without the biases relative to a given subject or set of subjects.
Socially constructed things can be observed objectively. Good and bad are no more amorphous than terms like "Japanese" or "punk rock," and we can certainly talk about the extent to which a piece of furniture or a TV show shows "Japanese-style/influence," or which rock bands are "more punk." Is it hard to operationalize such measurements? Sure. But objective facts remain, e.g. "the Moody Blues are less punk than the Ramones or the Clash." People can disagree with that statement; that doesn't make it not objective. People can also disagree about the atomic weight of lithium or the shape of the Earth.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Why not say that objective is the view with biases more or less shared among a normative community? That the shared moral objectivity with the group represents a bias is expressed by the terms it uses to refer to out groups, alien communities that dont share their norms.
Sure, there is obviously some bracketing here. The "closed" sign on a store objectively means "the store isn't open for business," but that doesn't mean that such a meaning is accessible from the viewpoint of a passing cat or dog. There is a context that is relevant.
Because this wont work for almost all of our uses of objective. Its objectively true, I presume, that water is composed of H2O. Do we want to describe this statement as a bias shared among a normative community -- of scientists, presumably? What would motivate us to call this a bias?
What we want in moral realism, then, is a sense of objective that at least resembles what we find in science or daily life, for that matter. And those who deny moral facts are indeed saying that the best we can do is biases more or less shared. But I dont think thats a reasonable synonym for objective.
Same goes for number. Science of course relies on mathematics, but the question of the nature of number is a metaphysical, not a scientific, one.
Here is where I think post-modernism falls into the trap of relativism. What is bias?
If I agree with the post-modern analysis that there is no *ultimate* or *absolute* objectivity, it's because I agree that there is no ultimately-existing object in the sense presumed by modern science. This is not to say there is no philosophical or noetic absolute, but that the nature of such, were it to be real, is such that it can't be apprehended empirically, but requires a specific kind of insight which has been generally deprecated in Western culture and which is more associated with philosophical mysticism and non-dualism. You find analogies for such an understanding in for instance the German idealists, but much less in most current schools of philosophy.
(Early Mah?y?na Buddhist philosophy accomodates this quandary with the 'doctrine of two truths'.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is use of the term "objective" in the same relative sense we use terms like "good" or "perfect" or "selfless"; relative to that which is less [X] that address is [X]; which leads to humorous tropes such as something being "better than perfect" (i.e., better that what was required for a proper fit, for instance).
Yet an objective rock will hold the same spatiotemporal properties to all humans, cats, and dogs; to all coexistent beings that happen upon the same rock in practice.
Getting back to what Joshs was saying about objectivity being intersubjective, hypothesize there being a reality which affects all coexistent psyches equally - this in principle at least - this irrespective of species of life or of the life addressed being earthbound. This I would term objective physical reality. Then, given this premise, one can either hold a materialist-like view of it or a constructivist-like view of it. In exploring the latter view, objective reality would then be that singular intersubjective reality (such as a language or a culture) which is common to all beings in the cosmos. This can then be inferred to lead to an idealism of sorts very much in keeping with Peirce's notions of physicality being effete mind that is itself always perpetually evolving, with universal laws being global habits. Here, objectivity is singular and, because it pertains to all equally, it pertains to no one individual being or cohort. Yet it is still "that actuality which, in being equally actual to all, is perfectly impartial to any one psyche or grouping of these", in this sense being (individual) mind independent. An objective reality we as individual minds perceive intra-subjectively via our inter-subjective filters of interpretation. Physical objects as those physically objective givens that invariable stand before us as subjects irrespective of our wants and desires as individual minds or collections of these.
I get this is an extravagant and, currently, idiosyncratic view of what objectivity entails. It's been my modus operandi for some time now, all the same.
If anyone finds inconsistencies with this given view in terms of what objective reality is, I'd love to know about the proposed inconsistencies.
(Within this worldview, an objective good - in the sense of that which is factually good for all when all biases are removed - can obtain. But this doesn't focus on physical objectivity, instead addressing that which is objectively real for all psyches, and which, in part, would govern the evolution of physicality's natural laws which C.S. Peirce for example makes mention of. But this is a mouthful - and I likely won't be able to adequately argue for it in a forum format. I would be grateful for any criticism regarding physical objectivity as just outlined, though.)
Quoting javra
Could we say that the reality which comes into play in an intersubjective community is the reality of each participants interaction with the world and with each other? Parsing this reality more closely, each person interacts with phenomenona that give themselves to the person in terms of flowingly changing perspectives, which change in specific ways when that person moves with respect to that phenomena. The person over time constructs the idea of a spatial object which persists identically in time as itself, with fixed properties and attributes that endure over time, even though the person never actually sees such self-identicality in the changing phenomenon. The notion of a real spatial object , then, is an abstraction that turns what is only self-similar into the self-same for the purpose of convenience. This is the origin of the notion of the spatial object. The subjectively constituted object becomes the empirically scientific, objectively real spatial object when we compare our own idealization of the flowingly changing phenomena we call a spatial object with the idealizations that others form of it from their own vantage. The resulting abstraction, born out of intersubjective consensus then becomes the empirically real object, the identical one affecting all of us equally ( even though the phenomena we constitute into what we call the object is never given identically to all of us, nor to any one of us).
Quoting J
Have you ever read Thomas Kuhn or Joseph Rouse?
Rouse is a philosopher of science who carries forward Kuhns insights:
Currently short on time, but yes, in many ways very much agree with your post. I mentioned the spatotemporality of a rock as objective on grounds that time and space will themselves be equally intersubjective to all coexisting beings that in any way interact (though, when further enquired into, this gets into parallels with the Theory of Relativity: whatever is in close enough proximity to causally interact will share a common space (distance between givens) and time (duration between the commencement of significant changes) ... but not necessarily so otherwise).
But yes, to simplify things, to my mind: a certain flower, for example, will have a certain pheomenal appearance to (almost) all members of the human species, which here share a common intersubjectivity as a species (with deviations deemed un-normal, such as with color-blindness). And so the flower's color being, for instance, red will be deemed objectively real by all humans. Different species of life, however, will perceive the same flower as holding different phenomena - all yet bound to the same spatiotemporal limitations of what the flower objectively consists of. So a bird, or cat, or insect will see the flower differently according to their own species-spacific intersubjective reality. Etc. With plenty of overlap between species in terms of phenomena.
If one likes, the objective world is however constituted of Kantian-like noumena.
As to issues of identity, that does get complex. But I'd yet maintain there occurs an intersubjectivity equally applicable to all sentient beings all the same when, for example, a bee, a human, and an extraterrestrial (if they occur) causally interact (such as by perceiving each other in relation to what the human sees as a red flower).
I'll revisit tomorrow. Thanks for the input.
This just seems like Kantian subjective dualism with some linguistic turn language sprinkled in to me. I don't see how such a free floating language comes to exist in the world in the first place. I think people make way to much of the fact that language can't be neatly formalized and is protean this doesn't make it totally sui generis and cut off from causation.
Let me throw this thought experiment at you from Scott Mueller's "Asymmetry: The Foundation of Information."
You have two seemingly identical diamonds and you're trying to figure out which diamond belongs to which person. You use all the tools commonly employed by jewelers, plus some chemical tests. As best you can tell, these two diamonds are 100% identical. They are indiscirnible from one another given a whole host of physical interactions (your measurements).
But then an assistant comes in with a mass spectrometer. It turns out one diamond actually has a significantly higher concentration of carbon isotopes, something that would make no difference for a whole host of physical interactions. This does make the two diamonds different though (one is now more valuable than the other for one).
He runs through similar examples of how some enzymes are "blind to differences" while others or not.
Does this give us any reason to suppose that "perspective" of some sort is relative to all physical interactions? It seems to us that a rock is just a rock for all things. Splash an assortment of liquids on an assortment of rocks and it's all the same interaction. But then depending on the rock, it might dissolve when some liquids are poured on it but not others, a sort of relative discerniblity in terms of "differences that make a difference."
His point was that the information content of things varies by context, even at a very basic level. The relevance here is that discoveries about the natural world sometimes require looking into interactions that only a handful of individuals are ever going to see, because they only occur in contrived lab settings, so they won't be part of most people's experiences.
That makes some sense to me. But then there is still the role of experiments, specialized equipment, etc. When we're trying to describe the natural world, we do a lot of very clever things to find out about it that other animals are simply incapable of. For them, the differences we find will never make a difference (until they result in some much larger scale effect). I'm not sure if that becomes a problem or not, but it does seem like advanced instrumentation can help create a more authoritative view on "what there is," even if most people aren't privy to using or understanding it.
The other problem is that the majority of any sort of "community" can obviously be wrong about facts, which gets at the idea of "justification" of claims. So maybe "everyone would agree on x if given the same data," not "everyone agrees about x." Historically, there are well accepted "objective facts," that it has nonetheless taken time to discover and satisfactorily demonstrate.
I like this one too.
I take it Rouse concurs with what he calls the postmodernist view (different from Kuhn, of course)? If we can "never get outside of language," this presumably includes that very statement. So what would make it true (or false)?
In any case, the point was really about bias, and I think this usage is eccentric. I may want to claim that water is H2O, but this doesn't mean I'm biased in favor of this belief. It only means that I hold it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
To suppose, why not? But this would lead into supposing some form of animism/panpsychism, which I so far cant make sense of. To accept? Id so far say no.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Of course. Trust is a big part of both society and the knowledge spread within. But then these discoveries ought also be replicable by anyone who so cares, making the data equally available to all that would be interested (and have it within their technical and financial means) to empirically experience the same data. Otherwise, one would quickly run into bogus claims and authoritarianism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I so far don't see how this would in any way conflict to what I theorized about the nature of physical objectivity, and agree with the observation.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again, I don't find disagreement with this overall picture. Examples might help: that the planet is roughly spherical is an objective fact that has taken time to discover and satisfactorily demonstrate. Yet not everyone agrees (if one can take flat Earth society as a serious enterprise by some), and such will disagree due not to greater intelligence or rationality or better data regarding the matter but due to, here it comes, biases to which they seek to conform the data of which they are aware. (This where "a bias" is roughly understood along the lines of favoring what one wants as an ego at the expense of what in fact is.)
I'm curious. If you have an ontological understanding of what physical objectivity consists of, as I presume you do, how do you go about demarcating the notion of "the objective world"?
That discounts philosophical or noetic intuition probably on the grounds that it is too near to religious revelation. But that is why postmodern philosophy falls into relativism.
Quite right and well said! :up:
I don't see how that's the case. It's maybe something more along the lines of Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics. It doesn't suppose any sort of first person perspective or mind tied to perspective, just a context specific frame for information.
I don't think objectivity should have anything to do with ontology directly. It's a mistake to turn it into another word for "noumenal." Objectivity is about what things are like with specific perspective biases removed, not "what things are like without a mind," or "what things look like from everywhere."
Quoting Leontiskos
i agree that a moral realism should resemble the sense of objective we find in science. But neither realism nor objectivity are monolithic terms. Physicist Karen Barad belongs to the community of new materialists who consider themselves realists and naturalists (Philosopher of science writer Joseph Rouse adheres to her agential realism). Her account draws strongly from Bohr, but is more more radically interactive. Normativity is not foundational in this view, but a function of how matter comes to matter within the different ways that interactions are configured, both between human beings and within material aspects of the world as a whole.
Im sure the above language is gobbledygook to you, but I think you should at least try and acquaint yourself with these ideas before you come to conclusions about what can or cannot be considered realism or objectivity.
Quoting J
Davidson thinks he is dismissing the very notion of a conceptual scheme, when in fact he is only dismissing the Quinean model and its underlying Kantian scheme-content dualism( Davidsons third dogma of empiricism) , which involves the identification of conceptual schemes with sentential languages and the thesis of redistribution of truth-values across different conceptual schemes. Two schemes/languages differ when some substantial sentences of one language are not held to be true in the other in a systematic manner.
Conceptual relativism does not involve confrontations between two conceptual schemes with different distributions of truth-values over their assertions, but rather confrontations between two languages with different distributions of truth-value status over their sentences due to incompatible metaphysical presuppositions. They do not lie in the sphere of disagreement or conflict of the sort arising when one theory holds something to be true that the other holds to be false. The difference lies in the fact that one side has nothing to say about what is claimed by the other side. It is not that they say the same thing differently, but rather that they say totally different things. The key contrast here is between saying something (asserting or denying) and saying nothing.(On Davidsons Refutation of Conceptual Schemes and Conceptual Relativism)
You are assuming a compatibilist free will as truth here. I'm saying there's no such thing. The "will to align yourself to your internal logic" which is a core part of the compatibilist framework is in itself a deterministic feature. There is no free will to being with.
But even in a purely deterministic framework, there's still room for incarcerations as preventative actions to block someone from continuing doing harm. However, people seem unable to imagine a world in which we put most effort into preventative measures, meaning, we understand that years of causes determines a person's actions and that if we make sure that our entire society aligns towards making sure all inhabitants do not end up in such causality, then we have mitigated the majority of crimes in society. The only ones who then end up in prison are those outliers with brain injuries changing their psychology, or who even though there are mitigating actions still fall between the cracks.
The problem is that people use the template of how things are in society today to inform how they process the idea of the justice system in a society more aligned by determinism as a guiding principle. So they fall into compatibilism rather than imagine the actual type of society that functions within a deterministic principle. So far, not even the best functioning societies in the world have a system that functions primarily along the lines of deterministic principles. Mostly because it is such a fundamental change to everything around us.
For instance, in a deterministically guided society we would need much better social securities. Especially for parents and their kids. Parents would need to also raise their children as part of a community and be more transparent about their family life since any problems for children need to be addressed before they manifest as psychological damage. Families would probably have a supporter who constantly council their day to day challenges and there would need to be a greater openness among neighbors and people living close to them since everyone to some degree would be part in the upbringing of the children. This prevents parents who are unfit as parents to damage their children's childhood creating a cause for their later lives in which such causes can manifest as everything from depression, anxiety, social problems, or criminal activity, murder etc.
This is just a small example of a fundamental change to society and as you can see it would require such extreme changes to our culture that it quickly begins to feel like an impossible change to society. How would we even begin to manifest such a radical change?
For starters, the idea of justice as retribution or "evening the balance" needs to be removed. While feelings of retribution are strong emotions and hard to overcome, the justice system needs to stop focusing on punishment. "Restoring the balance" can still lead to emotions of retributions and a causality chain that leads to vengeance rather than preventing harm from spiraling out of control. But when looking closely at what makes someone getting stuck in a constant loop of crime, it generally has to do with how society is unable to stop that loop or prevent it. People who continue on the track of criminal activity generally do so because there's nothing that helps them out of it, constantly creating new causes towards new crimes based on an already caused state of mind that holds them within this loop. If everything in society, from childhood to adulthood, exists to prevent people from ending up there, then the amount of criminals would drastically drop and the causality loop of retribution lowers, i.e the dominos of action, reaction, action reaction breaks or lowers so significantly that the only ones in need of incarcerations would be those who for some reason, brain injury or tremendous bad luck, still end up unable to get unstuck from a psychology of crime.
Generally, this is a total reform of society but it points towards a significant problem with how society is today. Most nations aren't even close to a form of society that actually improves the lives of its citizens. The US for instance, has a punishment mindset and such a fantasy ideal around "free will" that it's constantly on the edge of collapse. With people getting stuck in loops of crime, addiction, failing cities, homelessness and so on and so on. "Free will" is a curse onto the nation that intellectually hasn't grown to understand the significance of determinism as a guiding principle. We can probably blame "free market capitalism" for most of this since "free market" works under the guidance of the "free will" ideal. And therefore it informs how the entire system works and how it breaks people.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think you are mixing everything together here and produce unnecessary complexity in your understanding of my argument. Me saying "there's no meaning in the universe" relates to an objective meaning that we find in the universe. I.e something like, "there's a purpose and meaning from a "creator" who guides the universe". That is a no. That we form meaning for ourselves is the exact type of meaning that is possible. But you need to understand the specifics of my argument, otherwise you start to spin away from my actual argument into definitions of "meaning" that's not the point of my argument.
I'm focusing on the lack of universal meanings, objective meanings. Those are not what you find for yourself, those are objective. The specifics here are essential for the argument I made. And the argument had to do with how most people try to find some objective morality, i.e some rules that exist as universal truths. Such objective rules require a meaning that exists as a universal truth, a universal meaning.
Without it, which is what everything points towards, there can be no universal truths about morality other than what can be extrapolated out of what actually exists.
And my argument therefor has to do with how the only possible objective guiding principle for morality that is possible, is our biology, the science of human nature. That commonalities between cultures that have a basis in our biology, is the only objective realm we can move within if we want to find some universal moral laws for ourselves. From those we can extrapolate more complex principles as variables for a functioning society.
But we cannot use meaning that we form for ourselves as a foundation for morality because then we start to invent rules out of preferences that aren't objective. If someone find meaning in killing others due to a cause in their childhood producing such psychology, then oops, his morality is valid because his sense of meaning needs to be accounted for if we just use individual sense of meaning as a foundation.
No, we have to see what is objective and universal, our biology and human nature that has statistical significance between cultures. Those inform us of objective truths about human nature and those need to be the foundation for some extrapolated moral principles. What harms us, what gives as pleasure, what keeps us healthy and so on. Built together with deterministic principles, it would inform a society that functions better aligned with what we can defines as "good morals" and help create a good life.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, this is a problem of language. Objective can mean externally objective, i.e objective in the eye of the universe, cold dead objectivity. But can also mean internally objective, i.e internal to us humans, unbiased as a concept to us or objective as a truth measurable by our standards.
The things that does not exist is some universal objective (externally objective) morality that has some fundamental roots in the universe external to us humans. This is the type of morals that religion tries to impose on us.
Then we have ever changing subjective morals, which comes out of the idea that there's no morality, that there's no rule book at all. This is what many think is the result out of the Nietzschean "god is dead" and the nihilism that comes out of it.
Then there's the human objective morality (internally objective), that can be extrapolated out of our biology and measurable human nature. What defines our well being and happiness for ourselves and as social creatures. And this is the only morality in which we can find hints at human universal morality, because it is based on objective facts of human nature.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
An objective moral statement still requires a foundation for how it relates to human nature. You can say that Kant's categorical imperatives are objective moral statements since they are without biases, but they still produce problems in certain moral situations. Therefore you can't make objective moral statements just based on being unbiased towards the subjects, you need a foundational principle, and it's this foundation I'm arguing for being rooted in our biology.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
"Good" and "bad" can still be guided by commonalties between humans regardless of culture. And there has to be a guiding principle underneath. There's no point in discussing what is more punk or not if you don't have anything informing what "punk" actually is in the first place. Or you cannot debate the atomic weight of lithium if you don't have a definition of what "atom" means.
This is the problem with how people relate to the topic of morality. They form arguments about moral ideas without any common ground to extrapolate those morals from. And this is what I'm talking about.
If people use some external objective meaning in the universe as a guide for morality, then they are most likely forming opinions on morality out of "the voice of God" or some arbitrary invention in religion or spirituality since there isn't any such external objective meaning, and even if there was it is unknowable and therefore useless. This form is extremely prone to corruption through individuals own ideals and ideas about what they want the world to be like. So there is no common ground here.
If people instead form subjective morals based on the idea that there is no moral rulebook, i.e the nihilistic route, then that negates moral thinking all together. While possible to be true, do we want such a nihilistic world? Few do, therefore the need for moral principles remain and we are actually driven biologically away from such nihilism (which studies show in that we gravitate towards social structures and well being rather than being able to uphold any ideals of purely nihilistic existence). Nihilism can therefor not be a common ground either.
The only common ground that actually functions as a universal objective fact, is our biology, our human nature. This has to be the foundational ground that guides our moral thinking, from which we extrapolate ideas about what is "good" and "bad" for us. Only by accepting this can we start to form principles to live by and moral principles to be discussed about.
And it's this that I mean is measurable. Our human nature exists as an objective thing, and it is measurable. Anything disregarding this foundation when trying to produce moral facts fails.
I broadly agree with what you are saying in this post. However, I think that saying that our human nature functions as a universal objective fact, ignores genetic variation between individuals. Isn't it more realistic to think that we have human natures with, similarities, but also differences? How do you avoid creating a Procrustean bed?
I believe we (human species) have adopted moral values in order to create a stable, harmonious society, as a kind of attitude framework, to not live in absolute chaos where everyone would do as they please. Throughout our history, our numbers have grown and so has the need for moral judgement.
The classic ways of defining morality (objectivism, relativism, emotivism) are highly debated.
The big problem lies in formulating moral facts that count for everyone living on this planet. Because just because 90% decide something is morally wrong, doesn't make it morally wrong as a fact, a certainty. Very likely, but not 100% certain. Then, there is also the addition of intent when doing something morally right or wrong, but that is a completely other discussion.
Anyway, those are my 2 cents. I would like to add I'm a beginner in philosophy and English is not my native language, so pardon any mistakes.
Our "human nature" is mainly referring to those similarities. As I described we can look for similarities that exists between cultures, that transcends what we invent for ourselves in isolation.
But we also need to put those similarities in the context of history. For instance, what societies and social interactions have produced the longest form of well being for people? Because if we only look at similarities, we can find a lot of murder and war, or we can find a lot of bad strategies of handling a society that are returning throughout history. The key is, do they lead to the downfall of a society, or do they keep existing because of positive contribution? Finding what sticks and produce positive outcomes in forms like well being for the people and individuals in that society, helps inform what similarities to look for.
In order to avoid a Procrustean bed, is rather simple. Looking for the similarities between people and what gives them a sense of well being, using history as a guide to rule out bad practices and short term illusions, will inform what is in fact functioning for people as humans. The idea that we have individuality that differs so much that it produces an individuality in our biology does not exist, therefore we are more similar than we are different and the differences that exist can co-exist with such a moral system.
But the system requires the deterministic principle of society, i.e that we form society based on better understanding of the deterministic factors that form us. Because someone can find well being in killing others, it could even spiral into group think. And such thoughts can arise out of emotional needs for retribution of past events. In a deterministic society we control and mitigate the mechanisms that would produce such spirals out of control and with analysis of history on what frame of mind that can exist long term and what would collapse society, we can spot why it is immoral to produce such well being through killings.
The core tenets of it then has to do with deterministic-based society, historical studies and statistical studies on human nature and psychology. All of these combined can produce principles to live by.
What outliers and differences would not fit into that moral strategy? It's basically taking the categorical imperatives and places them in a context of human emotions aimed towards the well being of both individuals and the collective. Because most of the moral problems that exist comes from the inability to fuze Utilitarianism with Kantian ethics.
So if we form some basic tenets out of the similarities between all humans (biology) that are true regardless of cultures or historically different ideas, we have a core foundation to work from. Then use historical studies to form knowledge about what societal and sociological strategies give the most utilitarian gain for society and which last the longest (i.e does not give rise to revolutions or suppressions of some people), and frame all of it within the context of a deterministic-based society in which we focus on preventative measures and making sure causes for problems have more focus than mitigation of consequences. Both in justice and development of societal functions.
I do not propose that I have the solution here, but I believe that this is a path to explore if we are to combine aspects of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics into a better functioning system than what we have today.
I would say that they are probably correct -- there may not be tangible or objective morality, that's why we have laws (morality and the law) to enforce morality, at least some of our moral practices.
What I'm more interested in is what then do these people who complain about the lack of objective morality or the lack of tangible factual morality conclude? What is their conclusion? That a cruel regime should exist if in their own land, cruelty is not considered immoral?
If theres no short answer to this, no worries, youve referred me to Wang and Ill see what he has to say.
Quoting J
Wang argues that a conceptual scheme cannot be reduced to a sentential language.
These are difficult issues to take piecemeal, and I didnt mean to put you on the spot. Ill read Wang and we can discuss further.
There is widespread agreement on many of the properties of water, its identity as H2O, its boiling point, etc. But there is also widespread disagreement about many of its properties on some levels. For example, questions around the nature of chemical bonds, quantum effects, measures of entropy, etc.
This being the case for basically every topic (once you get deep enough into it, you reach the fringes of consensus), it seems to be the case the objectivity breaks down to a certain degree. In specialized, highly technical debates, there might be only a few viewpoints and they can be quite incommensurate (e.g. quantum foundations). It would seem to me that objective facts are only established once this sort of contradictory plurality is resolved.
But I think your judgement here is correct. We want our morality to be as apparent as "water is H2O." I think it actually is this way on a number of points. "Do not torture people for pleasure, do not molest children," are pretty much taken as concrete. Do people violate these precepts? Of course, but people often also agree that they act immorally. Do some people disagree? Sure, but some people also think the Earth is flat, so we shouldn't lose too much sleep over not convincing everyone. What justice means to the emergent whole of society is probably the more important thing.
I'm not assuming it. I am saying, if compatibilism is the case, the problem you bring up is not a problem. But I do find compatibilism more compelling in general, due to problems in libertarian theories that probably aren't relevant here.
Certainly crime prevention is a worthy goal. I see problems with making it the primary goal though. It seems to run into the problem Hegel points out, of treating other people as animals to be trained into proper behavior, rather than people to be lifted upwards into self-determining freedom. That is, if people are to be free, they have a right to be punished, to pay the costs of restoring right if they violate it. This doesn't mean that crime prevention, recidivism, etc. can't be part of the policy conversation, it just means that merely shaping human behavior towards ideal outcomes cannot ground justice.
This is true even if we take a very narrow definition of freedom as: "doing what you want to do and not doing what you don't want to do," which seems like a state that even a fatalist can allow a person might be in. That is, the self-actualized person's preferences are commensurate with the law. They accept following the law as a duty, as part of their identity, rather than them responding to surface level incentives not to break the law.
I tend to agree with Hegel's view, and I suppose Kant would say something similar re treating human choices as merely means to an end vis-a-vis aggregate behavior. Assuming fatalism seems to lead to something like Strawson's morality, which reduces justice into something akin to breaking a horse.
I agree on the policy ideas, but wouldn't this be beneficial even if there is some sort of acausal libertarian free will? Obviously, people's upbringing greatly effects their adult behaviors vis-a-vis criminality.
I agree that "vengeance" isn't helpful. However, restoring right is not equivalent to fulfilling an emotional need for vengeance. Crime is an infringement of other's rights, and of right as a whole. It is the denial of mutual recognition. The restoration of right consists in what was infringed being reasserted and reaffirmed by society. Crime is a negation of right and punishment is the negation of the negation."
This doesn't entail retributivism. In a mature moral relationship, there must be "space for persons to confess their moral shortcomings and forgive the shortcomings of others." This could result in something along the lines of restorative justice.
"The goal of restorative justice is to bring together those most affected by the criminal actthe offender, the victim, and community membersin a nonadversarial process to encourage offender accountability and meet the needs of the victims to repair the harms resulting from the crime."
Victims' and society's emotional need for retribution only comes up to the extent that a form of punishment will help bring criminals back into harmony with the ethical community, i.e., the criminal is seen as "having paid their debt to society." Punishment then is an expression of the rationality and freedom inherent in the legal and ethical order of a society. It represents the authority of the state and the collective will of the community in upholding the ethical norms. In this sense, punishment is not a mere act of vengeance, but an institutionalized expression of the community's commitment to justice.
Whereas, if we only care about "getting people to not do crime" (training behavior), we might not care about restorative justice. Why sit the criminal down with the victim and try to facilitate repentance and forgiveness if it doesn't boost outcomes re recidivism? But, if we think that criminals have a right to be free, and to develop such that they freely choose to join the ethical community, then we have an obligation to shape their punishment such that it (hopefully) results in them seeing it as a duty to the community -- one they accept. And this is not unthinkable, sometimes people admit that they deserve to be punished.
That said, I can see what you describe looking quite like what I've described when it comes to policy implementation. The difference would lay in the concepts underpinning the justice system.
See my and other's earlier replies. I don't think it's at all useful to say that "objective" is a synonym for "universal," or "of itself." Like this:
IDK about the usefulness of "internal" and "external" objectivity; I've never come across it before. It would seem to make it easier to conflate the concept of "objectivity" with the idea of "noumena" and "in itselfness," which is quite common. I think it comes out of the positivist idea that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit; more objective = more true." Positivism has fallen out of favor, but this idea has a zombie legacy. I would just consider whether it's a useful way to think about objectivity in the first place, since it would seem that "external objectivity" doesn't have anything to do with the possibility of subjectivity.
The rest, I agree with. I'd probably go even further and say that, rather than there not being "evidence" for some sort of universal meaning, the concept itself is fatally flawed. And biology, in the ways that it is able to clearly define harm, and to a lesser extent, flourishing, does seem to have paramount importance in grounding morality. Although, I would also add that the social sciences would seem to have plenty to say here.
I am not sure about this, although I don't think it's all that relevant. This seems to bring up Plato's Meno Paradox. Are things good because God loves them or does God love good things because they are good? If the latter, as often claimed by religions, then it would be the case that religion's authority when it comes to morality simply stems from the fact that the religion has been the recipient of divine revelations, special knowledge. Why does this revelation have authority? Because, presumably, God knows much more than us about the world, and has a better handle on justice. No "universal meaning" is required. It can be the same sort of "objective morality" we could create, just better formulated.
:up: agreed
Definitely. I didn't mean that there were no further questions about the nature of water -- or of objectivity. I just picked the chemical composition as a good example of an objective property, using "objective" in its most uncontroversial sense.
I'm glad the analogy with moral objectivity makes sense to you. I actually think "moral facts" are a tall order! But those who regard moral judgments as being about something other than personal or group preferences, or evolutionary equipment, probably need them in order to have a subject matter. Very broadly, I'm with Nagel on this -- moral thinking is sui generis, contentful, and argues from reasons rather than "desires" in the Humean sense. By appealing to reasons, it situates itself in the objective world, or perhaps something a bit more Peircean and intersubjective. Beyond that, we still have a lot of filling-in to do.
I focus on what type of determinism that is most likely. Compatibilism is in my view a sign of human arrogance over the forces of reality. A form of rejection of being under control of determinism because it just feels scary or bad. So I can only adhere to the type of determinism that science supports and which seem most rationally logic for us to function by. Therefor I can't view any "if"s as anything more than wildly more speculative than that which is the most rational foundation for the argument.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
All of this assumes free will exists. Self-determining freedom is faulty concept in a deterministic reality, it's a fantasy. That doesn't mean that we should treat people as animals to be trained, it's not about that. It's about making sure that people does not get damaged into becoming people perpetuating that cycle of violence as more damage.
The problem with using old philosophical concepts like this is that we have much better understanding of determinism today and how non-existent free will actually is. So whenever a concept is used that relies on a fundamentally required of truth free will in people, it falls flat. Without such free will, all we have is causality and forming society based on mitigating harm, violence and damage through preventing causal chains leading to it, is a much more rational strategy as a foundation for a better society.
So crime prevention should be the major focus, prevention of harm should be the main focus. The possible problem with such strategies however, is that people's analysis for what is harmful usually backfires. Like, banning rock music and video games in the 80s and 90s because people thought that was the causal chain to violence, while ignoring other social and societal issues that were in fact the real causes for it. Focusing on prevention of harm and violence requires deep studies with scientific rigor and hard evidence for the causal roots of events. And that's where the focus should be.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes it would, because it is a sound strategy to prevent harm. The problem is that because society is basically built on free will being true, all preventative actions to improve society are hard to fund and get support among the people.
The biggest problem installing such measures in society and focusing society from a retribution society to a preventative society is that people rarely see what has been prevented. We don't have news papers listing headlines of "Extra extra! Today, this would probably have happened if this thing hadn't been done 20 years ago! Extra Extra". No, what we see in newspapers are headlines after the fact, which triggers people's cry for justice and revenge. It's tangible and easy for people to get behind punishment, but hard to get them to support preventative measures.
If we however could inform society of how powerful determinism really is in forming and shaping our decisions, then it would be easier for people to be aware of the causality that shapes society.
This goes far beyond merely crime, it has to do with every part of society, everywhere, globally.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Which is a much better strategy overall. It also follows along the line of preventative measures to make sure cycles of violence breaks and the balance restored is the balance against such cycle of violence.
Of course, there are crimes that are unable to be solved in this way. Only crimes in which the criminals are conscientious of what they've done can be restored through it. But people don't realize how often these types of strategies actually works, because most of the time the public is blinded by vengeance.
There has to be strategies for when crimes do happen. That cannot be prevented. So, restorative justice in itself is part of preventative measures since it takes into account cycles of violence.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Which is why it's easy to see how these things were such a powerful tool of power over the people. But morality needs to make sense. It needs to have an internal logic that makes sense for us humans. Some can argue that many religions have their morality rooted in iterative justice over thousands of generations, but the problem is that since religion has gone in and out as a tool of power, it's infected by things that makes it rather irrelevant as a source for moral thinking. We then have to go back to the drawing board and find actual rationality as a foundation rather than just relying on arbitrary axioms found in these religious teachings and texts.
What is this "rock solid evidence," that no form of freedom can exist?
Consider this: If volition has "no effect" on behavior, i.e., it is epiphenomenal, then why did natural selection select for consciousness in the first place? If consciousness and the sensation of volition has absolutely no effect on behavioral outputs, it shouldn't be selected for. It must be an accidental byproduct.
But epiphenomenalist claims seem to be making huge assumptions here based on scant empirical evidence (indeed, I would say work in psychology tends to falsify epiphenomenalism in its more robust forms).
The most common arguments for fatalism I am familiar with do not rely on any direct empirical evidence that "volition has nothing to do with behavior." Rather, they rely on the claim that reductionism and smallism are true. That is, "facts about any living organism are reducible to facts about atoms and molecules. Atoms lack a will, and so volition must have no real effect on behavior."
There is a problem here. Reductive physicalism's claims hinge on the proposition that "there is no strong emergence in physics", that all physical change is reducible facts about "elementary" particles. This is an increasingly unpopular opinion in the sciences for several reasons.
-First, because it clashes with processed based, computational views of physics.
-Second, because it would seem to make it impossible to explain how first person experience emerges (an example of strong emergence), unless you embrace panpsychism, the view that everything, including atoms, have some level of phenomenal awareness.
-Third, you have things like Paul Davies' proof, which claim to show that the information processing capabilities of the universe are incapable of accounting for the complexity biological life unless there is strong emergence (and thus data compression). The last of these is probably the least convincing, the second probably the most.
Aside from that, the argument that "people only prefer compatibalism because it makes them feel better," makes no sense if epiphenomenalism is true. If our feelings and volitions have absolutely zero influence over our behavior, then it is simply a mistake to say that anyone's feelings have anything to do with what they do or say about anything. Feelings would be merely an accident caused by certain arrangements of feelingless molecules. But of course, such psychological arguments are so compelling precisely because they make sense in causal explanations, which should lead us to question epiphenominalism. So to, there is the problem of why our feelings should seem to sync up so very well with our actions if they actually have no direct causal interaction.
Further, the whole argument for epiphenominalism and fatalism from smallism ("everything can be explained in terms of atoms") crashes to the ground if we allow strong emergence to account for first person subjective experience. If some strong emergence is possible, why delimit it to only epiphenomnal consciousness and not a consciousness that affects behavior (in which case, organisms can be self-determining to varying degrees). Certainly, a consciousness that has causal effects makes more sense it terms for it having been widely selected for across complex organism.
Which is all to say, I find compatibalism more convincing because the evidence for strong emergence seems far more convincing.
For starters all evidence in physics and biology. There's nothing that breaks causality and entropy in our physical reality and saying that our consciousness is somehow disconnected from this have no rational ground whatsoever. If all evidence in science points to everything, including us, in our universe being part of a deterministic causality, then the burden of proof lies on the one claiming free will exist to prove that our will is in fact detached from this fundamental system. More recently you can also check out the recent works of Robert Sapolsky who drives a very good argument based on his scientific research.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Natural selection didn't break determinism. Just because a system becomes self-governing doesn't mean that it's parts have free will. The decisions of individuals is the result of a complex webb of causalities which leads to their decisions. All of your decisions have a cause, all your emotions have a cause, everything comes from the composition of your biology and from the environmental impact on you. Add to that all the social interactions that shape your world view, your opinions, your emotions, your culture, your politics, everything. Free will is a fundamental illusion that we can never break free from because if we did it would create such a fundamental dissonance in our cognitive function that it would drive us insane. Luckily, we do not seem able to do so. However, we can understand the concept, just like we can understand general relativity. We cannot experience time dilation, but we can understand it and measure it. Just like we can take the concept of causality and map out some parts that would help us figure out a better system of preventative actions in society to help people not ending up in harms way.
The problem is that you posit the free will cart before the horse. All processes in our brain, in our biology, in our nature and universe, are deterministic. Even if you were to include quantum randomness and how it might effect decisions in the brain, that still does not count as free will, only that there's a set of random dice throws that effect the brain. I.e randomness being just another cause. Free will requires a conscious will to do something without a previous cause and this does not exist, there is no evidence for it and there's a lot of evidence against it in everything from logical reasoning to factual evidence in physics and our biology.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I actually fail to see the throughline in this reasoning as an argument against determinism? Regardless of processes, you must prove that you can will something without a previous cause. A process that produces a random emotion or random state of mind does not equal free will, it equals just another cause. For us to have free will, it requires us being able to choose without influence of anything. But everything you choose is the consequence of a prior cause, always.
Name a choice that people can make that does not have any prior cause.
What evidence for strong emergence?
Causality does not apply at the quantum mechanical level. Whether it applies at higher aggregate levels is still up for debate.
For one, the idea of first person experience being strongly emergent, rather than molecules having their own phenomenal experience. Panpsychism seems implausible to me, and denying that consciousness "really exists" seems downright silly.
Second, strong emergence is in no way precluded by a process centered metaphysics. This has more to do with undermining the evidence against the the possibility of strong emergence that providing support for its existence. Nonetheless, its worth pointing out that arguments against strong emergence are largely based in philosophy in the first place.
Across a wide array of fronts, the natural sciences have concluded that process, not substance, explains a host of phenomena. E.g., heat as average motion instead of the substance caloric, combustion as a process instead of the substance phlogiston, life as a far from equilibrium thermodynamic process instead of there being a "vital substance," particles as part of an ever changing field instead of being discrete fundamental "building blocks," etc. The unification of the EM force and weak force also lends credence to the idea of there being no truly sui generis substances at work, that physics can be unified. Support for process as fundamental is support for a framework where strong emergence is possible. This is important because arguments against strong emergence are largely grounded in the fact that the philosophical framework in use precludes it.
In terms of positive evidence, we could consider variations on Robin Hendry's argument that molecular structure is strongly emergent. I recall seeing a poll that at least most chemists do not think their field can be reduced to physics. The heat carry capacities of metals would also be an area that suggests strong emergence. There are also a variety of arguments that quantum mechanics itself displays strong emergence, e.g., https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03831, https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12716/1/Emergence%20revised.pdf
I mentioned Davies' proof, and there are other, similar information theoretic arguments for strong emergence that I am less familiar with.
Then there is the wide popularity of pancomputational conceptions of physics, which would allow for strong emergence, although they also hinge on the speculation that the universe is "computable."
I would also consider the philosophical problems in defining superveniance to be evidence against reductive physicalism, even if they are not arguments in favor of strong emergence. That is, the concept itself that under girds popular forms of fatalism seems to have coherence issues, and I'm not sure if they can be ironed out.
Nothing needs to be framed in the context of this discussion. Nothing that remotely connects to free will, i.e our awareness of breaking causality through choice. Quantum randomness can break causality, it might even influence large scale events as a butterfly effect, but quantum randomness as influence on our choices would only boil down to another cause, a dice throw cause for an outcome. We aren't aware of it and it doesn't make us consciously aware of breaking from causality in choices. In conclusion, we can map out almost any choice by their causal connections in our reality and when we can't, the cause is randomness.
In the context of this discussion all we have to define our behavior in society, nature and the universe is determinism. All choices have a prior cause, all behaviors have a prior cause and the more we can understand and map out, the better we would be able to predict harmful actions and crimes in society. Therefore, a larger focus on researching preventative measures to make sure people don't end up in harm or violence should be part of a better society.
It reminds me of a concept in which society has the ability to look into the future. Let's say it's possible to change the now to influence the future. Most science fiction around such concepts works something like Minority Report, getting the criminals before the act. But what if we used such technology to just map out the consequences of people's situations so we can see if they end up in crime. It would drastically reduce crime in society by just changing small conditions in people's childhood. Only a fraction, maybe almost an insignificant number would end up in serious crime.
I think this is exactly right, and a good reminder not to confuse the two issues. Reductive physicalism can probably be defeated, or at least made implausible, by several strategies. Even Jaegwon Kim acknowledged that psychophysical supervenience is not in itself an explanatory account of the mind-body relation; rather, it reports the data that such an account must make sense of. But strong emergence remains such a poorly understood concept that, IMO, its hard to even know whether its a genuine biological phenomenon, or could play an explanatory role. Its too easy to kinda wave our hands and say, of consciousness, Well, it just emerges! But what does, exactly, and how? I think were waiting on the science.
This seems like something I could get on board with. I actually think the general idea here is crucial if law and society are to (continue to) exist. If there is no objective grounding for law then it is hard to see why it would be binding (assuming for the moment that "social contract theory" is largely a fiction).
I find explanations of emergence in terms of computation quite convincing. "More is different" seems ostentatiously true in terms of the "Game of Life" or very simple cellular automata being able to run through every computable function.
I agree that popular attempts to explain models of strong emergence in terms of superveniance are unsatisfying. I think this has more to do with the idea of superveniance though. The problem has been that the opponents of strong emergence have to some degree defined "a model of strong emergence that makes sense," as "one that works with superveniance."
The other thing I would add is that there are very, very many phenomena we study that have not been successfully reduced. Chemistry is not a new field, it is mature, and yet we still have serious questions about whether molecular structure can be reduced. This should give us serious pause when deciding that denying strong emergence should be our default position. Is it our default because we can find no phenomena we can't reduce? Absolutely not. Is it our default because of popular metaphysical assumptions? That seems to be more true.
I think the causal closure thing is a red herring. Strong emergence only seems to violate causal closure in the context of systems that have already begged the question regarding reductionism.
Barnes and others have made this case. We can reformulate causal closure in terms of elements of the world that are fundemental. Strong emergence is said to violate causal closure precisely because it is assumed that "basic physics" is the only thing that is fundemental, that higher level emergence cannot, by definition, be a fundemental principle because things must be decomposable into their parts. But all that is just a convoluted way to beg the question re strong emergence.
If strong emergence is a property of the "physical" universe, then by definition it doesn't violate the causal closure of all that is physical. It would not be a non-physical cause.
These don't say anything about strong emergence until the added (and IMHO unsupportable) premises about what is "fundemental" are added in.
We might be on the same page here, pretty much. Like you, Im not sure we can maintain physical/causal closure, in our current understanding of what this means, and also give a convincing account of emergence. Yet thats what many philosophers seem to require. Instead, we may need to rethink whether a commitment to the fundamentality of physics really precludes strong emergence. You know all the problems with trying to do this, Im sure. I think so-called top-down causation is the biggest roadblock. But Ill say it again we need a lot of help from neuroscientists here, who are surely still decades away from even a good theory-based hypothesis about how all this works.
I'm noticing a number discussions are not about things that could be called objective, even in light of the arguments for and against.
A example is one poster (cannot recall - apologies) discussing that H2O is an 'objective' (or not) property of water.
If your concept is a clearly defined, artificial object, then of course you can get artificially objective ideas about it. We have dictated that the two objects we have observed to make up the most abundant fluid we know of, are 'atoms' and for various other reasons, that those atoms 'are' Hydrogen and Oxygen.
Since we observe there to be One Hydrogen and Two Oxygen 'atoms' we can, based on our artificial scheme of (admittedly, extremely well-ordered) objects, pronounce the initial claim. However, per @Count Timothy von Icarus in the comments a few above this one, that seems to be essentially a universally accepted artificial symbolism and not anything objective in the sense of 'it would be true without human/sentient perception'.
Without a sentient (possibly human) being with the exact perceptual circumstance as to
1. Know those terms/concepts and how they fit together;
2. Know they apply to (what we are calling) water symbolicly; and
3. Be in a position to point that out
there could never be a claim that 'H2O is/describes/identifies water'. It is only true in light of those three requisites.
But, there seem to be two 'something' s that make up 'something' that we call water. So, the door is not closed. I just noted that particular move being made often...Really enjoying the extremely well-thought-out and time-intensive discussions here.
I'm also not very experienced in writing long-form responses so please take it easy if i made some rookie errors, or misunderstood something wholly. I'd like to learn :)
Just thought i'd throw this in for comments.
They all appear to be badly argued responses, and apart from one they all conclude that morality is objective. An interesting proclivity..