Mackie, "The Subjectivity of Values" / with Cole Nasrallah

[@Alemag_]

My man Kane is looking and he seems to be having fun. I am glad. By the way, I really enjoy your videos. Keep them coming.

[@KaneB]

This video was recorded in Mexico, and it was enormous fun! I'm back in the UK now though.

[@Karkkuss]

Love this new Miami Vice Kane, nice transition

[@KaneB]

Unfortunately, I'm back in the UK now, and although I do still own all the Hawaiian shirts, it's a bit too chilly here to wear them like this.

[@Karkkuss]

@@KaneB have the collar pop out the top of a sweater sometime! Can be a good fit :) cheers!

[@ColeNasrallah]

It is a dope shirt! Lol

[@marsglorious]

If I know that Kane B exists, how can I call myself an atheist?

[@HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke]

This was fantastic! More like this please! Although whether the magic ingredient was the subject matter, Cole's humor, or the beer, I don't know.

[@KaneB]

This video was made on a trip to Mexico, and unfortunately, we didn't record any others. So, there won't be more in-person videos with Cole anytime soon, as we live on different continents. Hopefully we'll do more in the future though!

[@jonashjelm6804]

Kane b, i have a volvo v60 and the engine symbol have started to show when i start it, how do i fix this?

[@KaneB]

Is this a meme that I'm unfamiliar with?

[@ignotumperignotius630]

There's a fault in the emissions control system

[@marshallbarrows5626]

@@KaneB think he is just making a joke cuz he doesn’t expect you to know

[@moonhouse3540]

Hahahaha, get it? Philosophy is useless! It can’t even fix this dudes volvo!

[@Bilboswaggins2077]

The queerness argument always seemed decently convincing to me. It seems that every time I envision a “moral fact” I keep asking myself what exactly is it and what might it be like.

[@Ansatz66]

It's best not to be persuaded by a mere failure to understand something. Imagine Tarzan who grows up raised by apes in the jungle and he has no comprehension of the nature of computers. If we asked Tarzan about computer engineering facts, he would have no idea what we're talking about. What exactly is a computer engineering fact and what might it be like? He has no answers for such questions, but that doesn't mean there are no answers to be had.

[@KaneB]

@@Ansatz66 Tarzan's incomprehension is just because he has no experience with or knowledge of computers. By contrast, there are plenty of people who are intimately familiar with moral theorizing, but who are persuaded by the queerness argument. Mackie's claim isn't that he can't understand what morality is. It's that he understands very well what it is, and on the basis of this, he sees that it is not the sort of thing that could exist, given what the world is like.

[@Ansatz66]

@@KaneB : If Mackie understood very well what what morality is, then it was an unfortunate choice of words to call it queer. _"If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe."_ This doesn't sound like the words of someone who understands objective values very well. It sounds more like someone talking about something that is totally beyond his experience.

[@KaneB]

@@Ansatz66 To me, it sounds like somebody who takes himself to understand moral concepts, and partly on this basis, is drawing some conclusions about metaphysics. What grounds could Mackie have for thinking that moral values would be metaphysically queer, if he didn't understand morality? By analogy, a common objection to Cartesian dualism is that it can't account for the interaction between mind and matter. When people make this objection, it's not that they just have no comprehension of what Descartes was talking about. They understand his concept of immaterial substance, and they think they have identified a metaphysical problem with it.

[@Ansatz66]

@@KaneB "What grounds could Mackie have for thinking that moral values would be metaphysically queer, if he didn't understand morality?" To answer that we must decide what it means to call something queer or strange. I would have said that it just means that we do not understand the thing, that it is outside of our experience. In that case, the only grounds that Mackie would need in order to justify calling moral values queer would be his own lack of experience or understanding. Since it doesn't seem metaphysically queer to me, it seems natural to suppose that I understand it better than Mackie did, but perhaps that's not what Mackie actually meant.

[@booklearn4487]

Perfect timing, I was just about to start reading Mackies book.

[@blankname5177]

really cool background.

[@zloyevrey3081]

Hi everyone! I have a question. How does a Error Theory deal with a presupposition failure and after that keep be a cognitivist moral theory?I mean if a central presupposition of moral realism is false, namely, “there are an objective moral properties” -false, therefore a moral judgment that depend on it suffer from lack of a truth-value( it can’t be either true or false, it doesn’t posses a truth -aptness). So we can’t name the error theory as a cognitivist moral position. Of course it would be a valid argument if we accept a Frege-Strawson position concerning the presupposition failure. Please give me some answers to my deliberation and some literature about a very discussion on a status of predisposition failure within the Error Theory. Many thanks !

[@jolssoni2499]

"therefore a moral judgment that depend on it suffer from lack of a truth-value" This doesn't follow. Compare with witch-discourse: there are no witches, therefore "Mary is a witch" is false. Cf. "Why formal objections to the error theory fail" by Streumer and Wodak on Analysis (open access article)

[@zloyevrey3081]

@@jolssoni2499 Thanks for the answer. Do you come across a presupposition failure? There is a position( Strawson and Frege held it and Russel was against it ) according to which if presupposition is false( take a witch’s account), namely “ there is witches “ is false, hence all sentence about withes are meaningless but nor false. You can check out some information on the subject here: plato.stanford.edu/entries/presupposition/ Have a nice day.

[@zloyevrey3081]

@@jolssoni2499 but I haven’t checked your article out yet. Perhaps I’ll find up the answer there

[@animore8626]

I know this video is a bit old but I have a question about the queerness argument, particularly the metaphysical section of the argument. It seems like Mackie focuses primarily on the motivational aspect of moralty in that section. That knowledge of moral truths/objective values somehow move people to act independently of their desires/inclinations. And as far as I know, this is pretty hotly contested; there are, after all, externalists about moral motivation who claim that making a moral judgment doesn't *necessarily* move you to act. But there seems to be another aspect to his argument, an aspect that you bring up here, about moral judgments providing *reasons* to act, not just motivation to act. So a judgment that "X is wrong" provides me a kind of reason to avoid X, independent of my desires/inclinations. So my question is, are these really two separate parts of the same argument? It certainly seems like Mackie doesn't make a clear separation, or at least he spends a lot more time on intrinsic motivation as if that's his primary concern. Is his argument from queerness primarily about the nature of moral motivation, and we can just give a very similar argument about reasons for action, or does he also focus on reasons for action, separate from questions about motivation?

[@0ScienceIsAwsome0]

here are what seem to me to be very similar pictures of mathematics and ethics: in mathematics, we are deriving theorems from axioms by following certain formal rules of inference; in ethics, we are deriving particular ought-statements from ought-axioms by following formal rules of inference. one can decide to let mathematics guide one’s expectations about what the world is going to be like (within a more general scientific model, anyway); one can choose to let a particular ethical framework guide one’s actions if you would agree that the above is a fair description of both mathematics and ethics, it is not clear to me in what sense mathematical truths are objective and ethical truths are subjective

[@0ScienceIsAwsome0]

one could also draw strong historical parallels here, saying e.g. that a lot of the ethical discussion done now takes the form “i want to argue for moral claim X. claim X follows from claims Y, Z, W that are “clear””, and, although im not awfully well versed in the history of mathematics, i would think that most (or at least a lot) of the math done before ZFC came around was also of this form (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_problem#Euler's_approach is one first example that comes to mind)

[@KaneB]

One important difference between those cases is that with mathematics, we can adopt whatever axioms we like, and we have constructed a host of incompatible mathematical systems. What is 10+10? 20, of course!... Unless we are using a modular arithmetic of the sort we might use to model a 12-hour clock, in which case 10+10=8. Similarly, consider Euclidean geometry vs hyperbolic geometry vs elliptic geometry. Or the many developments in inconsistent mathematics. Now sometimes, it makes sense to ask which system is correct, as for example when we ask which geometry correctly models the structure of spacetime. But we would not conclude, from the fact that the curvature of spacetime is modelled by a non-Euclidean geometry, that this geometrical system is true in some more general sense -- that the non-Euclidean system is true as mathematics, while Euclidean geometry is false. What we get with mathematics are truths such as: "in standard Peano arithmetic, 10+10=20", "in modular arithmetic modulus 12, 10+10=8", "in Euclidean geometry, two parallel lines extending to infinity never meet", etc. But the further question, "is Euclidean geometry or non-geometry true?" doesn't really make sense. We have to ask: true of what? What exactly are we modelling? As far as I know, even mathematical realists do not claim that there are mathematical facts that make it the case that, say, Euclidean geometry is true, period, while non-Euclidean geometry is false, period. That just seems totally confused as a way of thinking about mathematics (though admittedly, phil of mathematics is not my area of expertise). In the case of ethics, we can similarly construct whatever ethical systems we like. We might imagine a "sadistic utilitarianism", which is constructed on the axiom that the right action is whatever maximizes pain and suffering for the greatest number of people; and we can work out what this system tells us to do in specific cases. So similarly to mathematics, perhaps the following kinds of statements are true: "according to classical utilitarianism, it is morally right to switch the tracks in the trolley problem" "according to sadistic utilitarianism, it is morally wrong to switch the tracks in the trolley problem" But for a moral realist, the further question, "is classical utilitarianism true?" is perfectly sensible -- indeed, it's absolutely crucial. When we deliberate about moral problems, we don't just want to know what we ought to do according to such-and-such moral system. We want to know what the true moral system is. Moral realists think that there is a fact of the matter about this. This is where all the action between realists and antirealists is -- most antirealists are happy to accept that there are truths about what particular ethical systems entail. The truth of such entailments is just a matter of our concepts plus standard rules of inference.

[@0ScienceIsAwsome0]

@@KaneB Thank you for the detailed response. I agree with almost all of what you have said. (My only minor disagreement is with what you say about even mathematical realists not thinking that it makes sense to say that system X or Y is true, see e.g. the last paragraph of www.quantamagazine.org/how-many-numbers-exist-infinity-proof-moves-math-closer-to-an-answer-20210715/ for what I think is a paradigmatic counterexample.) I don't understand how your comment disagrees with my initial comment though (although it is possible that it was not your intention to disagree). I admittedly was not super clear about this in my initial comment, but I was only objecting to the supposed similarity between mathematics and morality-according-to-moral-realists, and to what I consequently take to be an implied opposition or difference between mathematical truths and moral claims according to other (e.g. anti-realist) views of morality (see e.g. 8:50 to 11:10 for the kind of thing I am trying to argue against here). My claim was just that there are absolutely parallel views of mathematics and morality; I think you might call both of the views I presented anti-realist. It seems to me that in your comment, you have actually expanded this parallel further by arguing that it makes sense to say that mathematical claims are objectively true or false only in a system-internal sense, which you also say is the case for moral truths. If this is a correct interpretation, then I am in total agreement. To summarize, mathematical truths seem to be objective only in the same system-internal sense as moral truths. (That said, I think these views of mathematics and morality let one engage in mathematical or moral discussions in a way that is more or less practically indistinguishable from a mathematical or moral realist on the object level. But this can remain a separate discussion.)

[@вернат]

The inqueal height and the closeness to the camera looks weird. I think that you should try some other format. Very good discussion

[@ColeNasrallah]

I'm actually hella tall, but I agree, the wide angle lens makes me look weirdly wide. It's my phone camera, and if I can accept looking weirdly fat, so can you :p

[@KaneB]

I really like how the video looks. Maybe I could sit on some cushions next time to equalize the height, lol.

[@ColeNasrallah]

It is also probably worth noting that we wanted to be close enough to the camera that we could be heard over all the other wonderful life-affirming, and slightly terrifying, sounds of Mexico. lol

[@ColeNasrallah]

@@KaneB I do look huge compared to you. But I just have a really tall sitting height. If you start sitting on cushions, we've reached a level of vanity that is just ridiculous. I look like a giant, and you enjoy slouching. I'm happy to own that.

[@вернат]

@@ColeNasrallah I was merely trying to help you achieve a format that would be more podcastesque to get more views, as you presumably must want. I didn't imply any of the things that you have commented on. I guess I should'nt have said anything

[@HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke]

Is the meta ethical theory that I accept meant to be what I think other people are saying by moral statements? Because it seems to me that comes down to _their_ meta ethical theory. When I'm listening to a fundamentalist Christian, I infer they mean 'forbidden by God', when I'm listening to someone looking at vomit I infer they mean yuck, etc. Maybe it would better be used to classify what I think the fact of the matter is, i.e. if objects or events objectively have an 'immoral' property, that sort of thing. But then some of the things said here seem to be hitting the ball in the wrong direction, like looking at the sentence structure when people say 'that is immoral' to suggest it is a description of an objective moral property.

[@Ansatz66]

"Is the meta ethical theory that I accept meant to be what I think other people are saying by moral statements?" The metaethical theory that you accept is the one that guides your usage and understanding of moral language. It is very useful if that usage and understanding matches the usage and understanding of other people, but it is not necessary. As an alternative, we can all just talk past each other and become confused. "When I'm listening to a fundamentalist Christian, I infer they mean 'forbidden by God'." That's a superficial analysis of what a Christian means by morality, but it's best not to stop there. There's a deeper question of why God forbids certain things. What qualities of a thing determine God's decision to forbid a thing, and so when we say that a thing is forbidden by God, what does that imply about the forbidden thing? Even fundamentalist Christians are unlikely to believe that God could dictate horrors and pointless nightmarish suffering and thus it would be good. God's goodness means something regarding what God will command and forbid.

[@KaneB]

"Is the meta ethical theory that I accept meant to be what I think other people are saying by moral statements?" That's one aspect of a metaethical theory. A central question in metaethics is: What do moral statements mean? What are moral concepts? Whether this is just a matter of how an individual in question interprets their own moral language I suppose depends on: (a) What broader theory of meaning you adopt -- in particular, it's not obvious that the meaning of a person's statements is determined simply by what they believe the meaning of those statements to be. A Christian can say that "X is wrong" just means "X is forbidden by God", but then if you push them on this (e.g. as Ansatz suggests, ask them why it is that God forbids particular things, or what they would say if God decided to promote suffering and death), it might turn out that this isn't really all they mean. (b) What you take the broader goal of a metaethical theory to be. We might propose it as a straightforward descriptive account of how people use moral language, or we might propose it as a precifisication of moral language, i.e. an analysis of what is fundamental to moral language, removing the vagueness and messiness of natural language. This would be a kind of conceptual engineering (see this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/a3Kzmmp7ZZ6CeLM ) "But then some of the things said here seem to be hitting the ball in the wrong direction, like looking at the sentence structure when people say 'that is immoral' to suggest it is a description of an objective moral property." If "X is immoral" attributes an objective moral property to X, then we can ask whether X does in fact have that property. We can evaluate whether "X is immoral" is true or false. This contrasts to accounts of moral language which hold that statements such as "X is immoral" are merely expressions of emotions ("boo to X!"), or expressions of command ("do not do X!"), or something along those lines, in which it wouldn't make sense to ask whether it's true or false.

[@HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke]

Awesome, thanks guys :) Meta-anything has always been vague to me. So all of those issues are part of this field of discussion - what other people mean, what I mean, and what objective facts we might be describing. That's a super interesting point, pushing people with the Euthyphro to reveal meaning might not directly correspond to what someone believes they mean! Mind=blown. Assigning meaning is more complicated than I thought. Perhaps when we dig into the details of what the fundamentalist Christian really means, I'll think it's actually incoherent. Then do I adopt a label that I am a ~'moral incoherentist'? They are just a section of the population, and people are using the words differently. That variety of positions out there is why labeling myself based on what other people mean seems problematic. I might find myself adopting practically every label, relative to some group in the world. I might be both a moral realist and a moral antirealist, if they were theories of language instead of theories of objective facts or ontology :) :)

[@fanboy8026]

Do you watch the big bang theory?If you did what is your view on that show na dthose that show support scientism

[@KaneB]

I've never seen it.

[@ColeNasrallah]

I also have never watched it, but it seems like a good idea to avoid taking our theories from sitcoms (ESPECIALLY ONES WITH LAUGH TRACKS).

[@joshclark7220]

Circumcision is evil! It made my heart happy to hear that!

[@Boigotideas]

Bruh the water in the background

[@paulaustinmurphy]

I really must brush up on metaethics. I seem to remember annoying Kane B the last time I responded (which, I assume, he'd deny) because I didn't know much - or anything - about metaethics. I still don't... What happened to Kane's hair? I have learned much from Kane's non-ethical videos. I've even sold his channel on Twitter.

[@KaneB]

I'd had long hair for about 15 years. Over that time, lots of people suggested to me that I might have more luck with dating if I cut it, and I realized that although I do think long hair is cool, I don't actually care about it enough to outweigh that potential benefit. Also, thanks for promoting the channel on Twitter! I should probably do that sort of thing myself, and I've thought about making a twitter a few times, but I'm never sure what I would say on it.

[@paulaustinmurphy]

@@KaneB In terms of Twitter - I admit I mainly use it to "sell" my essays... and photos/poems. But since I'm not an academic or a "name" - Twitter seems to make sense. And you can also get around the word-count limitation too if you're clever enough. (For example, put longer texts on an image and tweet that.) That may defeat the object of Twitter, though. Also, you can tweet pretty powerful stuff in succinct form. Many people on Twitter do. The thing is, many academic (analytic) philosophers tend to be very crude and simplistic on Twitter and I don't believe that this is simply because it's Twitter. Others (i.e., non-philosophers) make an effort to argue their case - even on Twitter. I have certain very tribal academic philosophers in mind (on Twitter) whom I won't name. Such people throw their philosophical training out of the window as soon as they step foot on Twitter. Perhaps that's the nature of the Twitter beast...

[@Oskar1000]

Do you think that divine command theory counts as objective morality. Seems like it still boils down to them liking God and wanting to obey God. Also if God is a mind and it's his values then they aren't even mind independent in the first place.

[@KaneB]

I suppose this just comes down to how you want to define "objective". Under DCT, the moral rules are discovered, not invented by us; they are universal; they are independent of what any particular human believes; moreover, unlike in any other metaethical system, they are at least potentially backed up by genuine reward and punishment... perhaps that's enough for objectivity.

[@Oskar1000]

@@KaneB I've been playing around with the idea that moral statements are descriptions of what maximally empathetic and maximally rational agents would think/do. This feels equally objective to me (minus the punishment I guess)

[@DrJPTomlinson]

Morality arises out of a particular set of biological, social, cultural, temporal etc. conditions. If we had different bodies with different biological needs and lived in differently constructed societies with different ways of engaging, our moral discourse and mores would be very different. This is different from a claim of moral subjectivity, but claims that morals may be queer, but cannot be isolated from the material/ social world. Indeed it's only because of the constraints of these worlds that morality is possible because it's about what we ought to do in the situation we're in rather than any other. I'm not sure whether I've understood Makie's subjectivity here ...

[@tombehiri7444]

The sound in this one is just awful

[@nickpharoah]

Audio is terrible.

[@dominiks5068]

probably the worst book of philosophy ever written.

[@cdrksn]

Ironically, I think the queerness charge really is an appeal to an intuition itself (or it is just presupposing some kind of naturalistic worldview). There's really nothing you can say to convince someone who just doesn't find objective values queer or maybe finds them queer but not *too* queer to countenance them. So it's just an intuition that the realist doesn't share.

[@ColeNasrallah]

I feel like maybe you didn't watch the video. The problem with objective values is that we can use none of our normal methods to locate, discover, or know about them. That's not intuition. That's literally pointing out that neither senses, nor scientific inquiry, nor logic itself could detect such a thing.

[@cdrksn]

"neither senses, nor scientific inquiry, nor logic itself could detect such a thing." Ok, so the problem is that we would need a strange faculty to detect them, which is unlike any of the ones we are familiar with. But the intuitionist doesn't find this faculty strange at all or not stranger than other strange things in the universe. So how would you try to convince them other than saying 'well, i just seems too strange'.

[@KaneB]

@@cdrksn I think Mackie would say something like this: How exactly is this faculty of moral intuition hooked up to the moral facts? In the case of perception, for example, we can tell a story about how things in the world influence our perceptual content. We were able to tell a story about this, in sketch form, even before the modern science supplied all the details about our perceptual systems. Similarly, we can see how conducting experiments allows us to select among different scientific hypotheses. But what is the connection between the moral properties and our moral intuition? This problem is especially pressing given the apparent variation in moral intuitions: when faced with an apparent conflict between different intuitions, how do we decide whose intuitions are tracking the facts? Of course, the intuitionist can say that she doesn't find anything strange about the faculty of moral intuition. But that doesn't answer these kinds of questions. Here's an analogy. Suppose there is a society in which it is believed that people have "auras". Some people have hard auras and others have soft auras. The type of aura a person has determines what will happen to them in the afterlife. Moreover, the people in that society claim to be able to detect, by a special faculty of intuition, the type of aura that a person has. They grant that auras are not detectable through perception or introspection, that they are not revealed by scientific instrumentation, and that they are not postulated as part of explanatory hypotheses to account for empirical evidence. Auras are known through intuition. We might respond to this by saying that aura intuition would be a strange faculty. But of course, it's not just that it's strange. It's that, based on our background understanding of how humans gain knowledge of the world, there doesn't seem to be any way that aura intuition could be tracking the aura facts (even if there are aura facts); and there doesn't seem to be any way of deciding, when one persons intuits a hard aura and another intuits a soft aura, who is correct. Obviously this isn't a conclusive argument -- it's always possible that some story will be given about how aura intuition works. But it probably won't be very convincing for the defenders of aura intuition to say, "well, *I* don't find it strange."

[@-ring-a-ding-my-dingaling]

@@cdrksn The problem with just supposing that there's some moral faculty likewise seems to be that we can explain everything we observe about people's moral intuitions without so appealing. If so it just seems like a case where one person is committed to a set of theoretical entities that adequately explain the data and another who is committed to that same set plus 1. On just about any construel of theory selection it's just going to fall out that the first person's theory is better. In fact, the only way to avoid this conclusion, that anti realism explains the data better, is ask it to explain objective moral truths, which would just be question begging against the view.

[@Ansatz66]

@@KaneB "How exactly is this faculty of moral intuition hooked up to the moral facts?" Moral intuitions are an evolved mental heuristic built into the biology of our brains to cause us to quickly and intensely react to moral and immoral things. Immoral things like theft and murder are detrimental to a cooperative group, and our ancestors survived through cooperation. Groups that tended to behave morally would have had a survival advantage, and so DNA that prompts moral intuitions would tend to spread and flourish. Groups that are oblivious to morality would tend to struggle, so their DNA would fade away. In this way our ancestors gradually evolved moral intuitions, probably long before they were human or capable of the kind of reasoning that would allow them to thoughtfully analyze morality. "What is the connection between the moral properties and our moral intuition?" There is no direct connection. It's just a heuristic. Our intuitions are estimates, and they an unreliable way of reaching conclusions because they are thoughtless biological reactions instead of careful measurements and reasoning. "When faced with an apparent conflict between different intuitions, how do we decide whose intuitions are tracking the facts?" We look at the actual facts and thereby judge the intuitions. We can make measurements and conduct studies and do our best to examine which actions lead to happy, healthy, thriving people, and which actions lead to misery and disaster. We do our best to correct for biases and eliminate our own intuitions from the analysis, and once we have the facts, we can go back and compare the actual facts to what people's intuitions were telling them. Whoever's intuitions most closely resembled the facts is the winner. "The people in that society claim to be able to detect, by a special faculty of intuition, the type of aura that a person has. They grant that auras are not detectable through perception or introspection, that they are not revealed by scientific instrumentation, and that they are not postulated as part of explanatory hypotheses to account for empirical evidence." For some things that would be strange, but it depends on the nature of an aura. For example, an aura might be akin to property ownership. In our society we can detect who owns a piece of land, but it's not through perception or introspection. There's no visible thread floating through the air hooking people to their land, and no scientific instrument to detect ownership. Property ownership isn't postulated as part of an explanatory hypothesis to account for empirical evidence. Even so, it wouldn't be fair to say that property ownership isn't real. It's not a physical object like a rock, but ownership is its own kind of thing, perhaps even unlike anything else in the universe, and we understand the nature of property ownership and it is not strange. We're missing the relevant questions that we really should ask that society in order to understand auras. We shouldn't just ask about ways that auras cannot be detected, but rather we should ask about what auras actually are. Once we understand the nature of an aura, it may make perfect sense that the only way to detect it is through a special faculty of intuition. If society weren't so scientifically sophisticated, we could easily be in a situation where intuitions are our only way to detect morality. Sometimes all we can do is hope that evolution has programmed us with more wisdom than our reasoning can manage.