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The problem is that ethics can work with other axioms. Someone might be a deontologist, and define ethics around bad actions e.g. "murder is bad", not because the suffering of the victim and their bereaved loved ones is bad but because murder is bad. Such a set of axioms results in a different ethical system than one rooted in consequentialist axioms such as "suffering is bad", but by what measure can you say that the one system is better than the other? The difference is hardly the same as between attempting rationality with empiricism vs without.
There is a difference, I'll be posting it Friday. I've got an exam tomorrow and it still needs some finishing touches. This project got a bit out of hand, the complete train of thought is about 4 pages long to explain properly, so a post is more appropriate than a comment. I'd like to hear your opinion on it, if you are willing :)
Short answer, people will kill you.
8-0 Your universal ethics are "whatever is acceptable in this society at this particular time"??
Dear lord no. I've almost finished the post, I'll be uploading it this weekend or something (with graphs :) ), but below is my one paragraph version of it. Please refrain for a whole two days from forming a definitive opinion, until I can present my case fully.
Morality is a real effect on the distribution of utility functions within a society. It has a singular direction that is a consequence of conflicting utility functions of all people in society. Imagine making a frequency distribution of utility functions (for the moment it doesn't really matter what is on the x-axis). Now the tails of this distribution will conflict (assuming for the simplest case where the average opinion is neutral). That is people will want to change the behaviour/utility functions of other people. Because people have a stronger tendency to loss aversion than to pleasure gain there will be a net effect towards compromise (also due to the nash equilibrium). This means that on average utility functions will converge towards a "social norm". So far I have not seen one society which does not have some set of social norms. This means that in every society there is a tendency to make people conform to a standard. This may not seem important at first but consider the alternative, a group of people who will go to unlimited lengths to get what they want because they only consider themselves to be important. Note that even North Korea, ISIS, Jonestown and the Nazis didn't go that far. Even in those societies (which are generally considered evil) the net effect of the social norm was still better than complete ultra-anarchy. This is not superpessimistic about human nature, it is however superoptimistic about human society. So in each society there is a tendency to force people to reduce loss (or to step out of economic terms: suffering). In some societies this tendency is admittedly very small, in some it is very large. Why I included moral relativism in my list is that, based on this knowledge, it is false to say all societies are equally moral. Clearly some societies have larger groups of conflicting utility functions than others. More peaceful societies are using this terminology, more moral. The only assumption that I personally make is that I deem more moral societies good and less moral societies bad. (If that sentence seems tautological, try reading the paragraph with all the words moral replace with smurf or something. Or wait till Friday, if you are still interested :) )
So note that I have not used should, ought, must, good and evil in this entire paragraph. It is merely a description of reality. So when I said "people will kill you", I did not mean, people will retaliate every time, I did not mean that a particular case of retaliation is morality. I mean that the average action of retaliation teaches people to avoid it. People experience this as "having a conscience", but that is just fancy words for being conditioned, ala Pavlov.
I therefore hold that it is inconsistent to be relativistic about morality but not about empiricism
Well, then it's also inconsistent to be relativistic about gastronomy. And wine. And fashion. And books. And prettiness.
If you say A, you've got to go through the whole alphabet :-)
On the other side, of course, is what is basically Samuel Johnson's refutation. You want to deny empirical reality and science, maybe I'll even come to your funeral. You want to deny some particular ethics, well, what will happen?
Short answer, people will kill you. The long answer is about 2.5 sheets by now. Maybe I'll post it :). Hopefully that won't go as disastrously, with people getting pissed off, as this one.
The point is we have to make certain assumptions to get anything done. Without them we can't have science, we can't have ethics. We'd be all alone with our own thoughts. This is the same problem Descartes struggled with as well. He had so effectively doubted everything that he concluded that he could only know one thing with 100% certainty, that is, that he existed. All other possibilities are merely probable and require certain assumptions. I therefore hold that it is inconsistent to be relativistic about morality but not about empiricism (and by extension most of rationality).
The point is we have to make certain assumptions to get anything done. Without them we can't have science, we can't have ethics. We'd be all alone with our own thoughts. This is the same problem Descartes struggled with as well. He had so effectively doubted everything that he concluded that he could only know one thing with 100% certainty, that is, that he existed. All other possibilities are merely probable and require certain assumptions. I therefore hold that it is inconsistent to be relativistic about morality but not about empiricism (and by extension most of rationality).
I apparently still do not entirely get the commenting system here. Apologies.
The possibility of anything you can think of (and everything you can't think of, too) exists. So what?
The point is we have to make certain assumptions to get anything done. Without them we can't have science, we can't have ethics. We'd be all alone with our own thoughts. This is the same problem Descartes struggled with as well. He had so effectively doubted everything that he concluded that he could only know one thing with 100% certainty, that is, that he existed. All other possibilities are merely probable and require certain assumptions. I therefore hold that it is inconsistent to be relativistic about morality but not about empiricism (and by extension most of rationality).
I don't recommend testing this X-/
Neither do I :) But the possibility exists, we just assume it doesn't.
Why couldn't the same be true for ethics?
Because if you disbelieve empiricism and jump off a tall building, you will die. If you disbelieve ethics of suffering and become evil, you get to build a lair with slave girls and a white cat.
If you disbelieve in empiricism and jump of a building you may die. If all of reality actually is a simulation, there is no telling what will happen.
Well, I don't think "a bit of a middle-ground" justifies taking a stance calling full-on moral relativism "immoral, pointless & counterproductive".
"Suffering is bad" seems a lot easier to agree on as a premise than it actually is - taken by itself, just about anyone will agree, but taken as a premise for a system it implies a harm-minimising consequentialist ethical framework, which is a minority view.
And it's simple enough to consistently be pro-life but also support the death penalty: if one believes a fetus at whatever stage of development is a human life and killing it is equivalent to murder, as many pro-lifers ostensibly do, one must simply have consistent standards for when killing is okay, that include a government convicting someone of a capital crime but exclude a mother not wanting to drop out of college.
We use analogies and the occasional bit of mysticism often enough that I think references are consistent, although the term has entered the popular consciousness and become divorced enough from the original religious concept that worrying about its origins seems to be mostly an ideological purity issue, a kind of worrying that's itself pretty irrational to engage in.
But can't the same be said for rationality and science? As Descartes showed a "demon" could continuously trick us with a fake reality, or we could be in the matrix for all we know. For rationality to work we have to assume that empiricism holds true. Why couldn't the same be true for ethics? I think that if science can have its empiricism axiom, ethics can have its suffering axiom.
I believe the problem people have with this is that it isn't actually helpful at all. It's just a list of outgroups for people to laugh at without any sort of analysis on why they believe this or what can be done to avoid falling into the same traps. Obviously a simple chart can't really encompass that level of explanation, so it's actual value or meaningful content is limited.
Thinking about it some more, I think it could. The problem with the chart is that the categories are based on which outgroup the belief comes from. For a more rational version of the diagram, one could start by sorting the beliefs based on the type and strength of the evidence that convinced one the belief was "absurd".
Thus, one could have categories like:
no causal mechanism consistent with modern physics
the evidence that caused this a priori low probability hypothesis to be picked out from the set of all hypotheses has turned out to be faulty (possibly with reference to debunking)
this hypothesis has been scientifically investigated and found to be false (reference to studies, ideally also reference to replications of said studies)
Once one starts doing this, one would probably find that a number of the "irrational" beliefs are actually plausible, with little significant evidence either way.
That actually is a very good idea, thanks :) I'd would become impossible for anyone to read unless they got their hands on a introductory statistics book of course. But some explanatory text should be able to fix that. Do you have particular items that you think should be removed? I am only human, there is bound to be a mistake or two on such a large list.
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But... but... but....
:-)
I know I know forgive me please