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Morality Isn't Logical
ddxxdd00

I referenced him because I recall that he comes to a very strong conclusion- that a moral society should have agreed-upon laws based on the premise of the "original position". He was the first philosopher that came to mind when I was trying to think of examples of a hard statement that is neither a "proposition" to be explored, nor the conclusion from an observable fact.

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0BerryPick6
I mean, I'm pretty sure his conclusion is a "proposition." It has premises, and I could construct it logically if you wanted. In fact, I don't understand his position to be "that a moral society should have agreed-upon laws" at all, but rather his use of the original position is an attempt to isolate and discover the principles of distributive justice, and that's really his bottom line.
Morality Isn't Logical
ddxxdd30

Sometimes you want people to suffer. For example, if one fellow caused all the suffering of the rest, moving him to less suffering than everyone else would be a move to a worse universe.

...because doing so would create incentive to not cause suffering to others. In the long run, that would result in less universal suffering overall. Isn't this correct?

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1buybuydandavis
No, that's not my motivation at all. That's not my because. It's just vengeance on my part. Even if one regarded the design of vengeance as an evolutionary adaptation, I don't think that vengeance minimizes suffering, it punishes infractions against values. At that level, it's not about minimizing suffering either, it's about evolutionary fitness.
ddxxdd-10

I have some trouble with your logic.

You cannot beg off responsibility for power that you actually do possess. "Alice put a post on your web forum saying that all green-eyed, black-haired people are dirty wiggins and maybe we should bisect them all! Are you really OK with that!?"

Youtube and Reddit all have a mostly hands-off approach towards moderation. When people use poor grammar and poor spelling on those sites, the administrators don't come down and say that those comments are not allowed. When near-illiterate people make garbage comments ... (read more)

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ddxxdd30

In the Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio, the courtroom judges were to rule on whether or not obscenities were protected by the 1st Amendment. The resulting decision was that all speech should be protected in the public square except for hardcore pornography. Justice Potter Stewart, in writing the concurring opinion, when writing about what exactly constitutes hardcore pornography, stated this:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succ

... (read more)
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Morality Isn't Logical
ddxxdd00

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to the article, and for the critique; you are correct in that I am not well-versed in Greek philosophy. With that being said, allow me to try to expand my framework to explain what I'm trying to get at:

  • Scientists, unlike mathematicians, don't always frame their arguments in terms of pure logic (i.e. If A and B, then C). However, I believe that the work that comes from them can be treated as logical statements.

Example: "I think that heat is transferred between two objects via some sort of matter that I... (read more)

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0whowhowho
But there is a mini-premise, inference and mini-conclusion inside every "hypothesis-implication pair".
0BerryPick6
I'm curious as to why you referenced Rawl's work in this context. It's not apparent to me how Justice as Fairness is relevant here.
8[anonymous]
I see. You're right that philosophers pretty much never do anything like that. Except experimental philosophers, but thus far most of that stuff is just terrible. "In the framework that I'm working in..." That's a good framework with with to approach any philosophical text, including and especially the Platonic dialogues. I just wanted to stress the fact that the dialogues aren't treatises presented in a funny way. You're supposed to argue with Socrates, against him, yell at his interlocutors, try to patch up the arguments with premises of your own. It's very different from, say, Aristotle or Kant or whatever, where its a guy presenting a theory. Would you mind if I go on for a bit? I have thoughts on this, but I don't quite know how to present them briefly. Anyway: Students of Physics should go into a Physics class room or book with an open mind. They should be ready to learn new things about the world, often surprising things (relative to their naive impressions) and should often try to check their prejudices at the door. None of us are born knowing physics. It's something we have to go out and learn. Philosophy isn't like that. The right attitude walking into a philosophy classroom is irritation. It is an inherently annoying subject, and its practitioners are even worse. You can't learn philosophy, and you can't become an expert at it. You can't even become good at it. Being a philosopher is no accomplishment whatsoever. You can just do philosophy, and anyone can do it. Intelligence is good, but it can be a hindrance too, same with education. Doing philosophy means asking questions about things to which you really ought to already know the answers, like the difference between right and wrong, whether or not you're in control of your actions, what change is, what existing is, etc. Philosophy is about asking questions to which we ought to have the answers, but don't. We do philosophy by talking to each other. If that means running an experiment, good. If tha
Morality Isn't Logical
ddxxdd30

I just stumbled into this discussion after reading an article about why mathematicians and scientists dislike traditional, Socratic philosophy, and my mindset is fresh off that article.

It was a fantastic read, but the underlying theme that I feel is relevant to this discussion is this:

  • Socratic philosophy treats logical axioms as "self-evident truths" (i.e. I think, therefore I am).

  • Mathematics treats logical axioms as "propositions", and uses logic to see where those propositions lead (i.e. if you have a line and a point, the number/

... (read more)
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0BerryPick6
Thank you for an awesome read. :)
0whowhowho
science uses logical rules of inference. Does science take them as self-evident? Or does it test them? And can it test them without assuming them?
1JonathanLivengood
Interesting piece. I was a bit bemused by this, though: Problematically for the story, Plato died around 347 BCE, and Archimedes wasn't born until 287 BCE -- sixty years later.
2[anonymous]
I read the article. It's interesting (I liked the thing about pegs and strings), but I don't think the guy's (nor you) read a lot of actual Greek philosophy. I don't mean that as an attack (why would you want to, after all?), but it makes some of his, and your claims a little strange. Socrates, in the Platonic dialogues, is unwilling to take the law of non-contradiction as an axiom. There just aren't any axioms in Socratic philosophy, just discussions. No proofs, just conversations. Plato (and certainly not Socrates) doesn't have doctrines, and Plato is totally and intentionally merciless with people who try to find Platonic doctrines. Also, Plato and Socrates predate, for most purposes, logic. Right, Aristotle largely invented (or discovered) that trick. Aristotle's logic is consistant and strongly complete (i.e. it's not axiomatic, and relies on no external logical concepts). Euclid picked up on it, and produced a complete and consistant mathematics. So (some) Greek philosophy certainly shares this idea with modern mathematics. I don't think scientists treat logical axioms as hypotheses. Logical axioms aren't empirical claims, and aren't really subject to testing. But Aristotle's work on biology, meteorology, etc. forwards plenty of empirical hypotheses, along with empirical evidence for them. Textual evidence suggests Aristotle performed lots of experiments, mostly in the form of vivisection of animals. He was wrong about pretty much everything, but his method was empirical. This is to say nothing of contemporary philosophy, which certainly doesn't take very much as 'self-evident truth'. I can assure you, no one gets anywhere with that phrase anymore, in any study. Not if those ethical axioms actually are self-evident truths. Then hypothetical situations (no matter how uncomfortable they make us) can't disrupt them. But we might, on the basis of these situations, conclude that we don't have any self-evident moral axioms. But, as you neatly argue, we don't h
Morality Isn't Logical
ddxxdd10

Every act of lying is morally prohibited / This act would be a lie // This act is morally prohibited.

So here I have a bit of moral reasoning, the conclusion of which follows from the premises.

The problem is that when the conclusion is "proven wrong" (i.e. "my gut tells me that it's better to lie to an Al Qaeda prison guard than to tell him the launch codes for America's nuclear weapons"), then the premises that you started with are wrong.

So if I'm understanding Wei_Lai's point, it's that the name of the game is to find a premise that... (read more)

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0jsalvatier
(whisper: Wei Lai should be Wei Dai)
0buybuydandavis
Nope. Even if one grants objective meaning to a unique interpersonal aggregate of suffering (and I don't), it's just wrong. Sometimes you want people to suffer. For example, if one fellow caused all the suffering of the rest, moving him to less suffering than everyone else would be a move to a worse universe. EDIT: I didn't mean "you" to indicate everyone. Sometimes I want people to suffer, and think that in my hypothetical, the majority of mankind would feel the same, and choose the same, if it were in their power.
1palladias
This is why I find Harris frustrating. He's stating something pretty much everyone agrees with, but they all make different substitutions for the variable "suffering." And then Harris is vague about what he personally plugs in.
1[anonymous]
I hope so! It would be terribly awkward to find ourselves with true premises, valid reasoning, and a false conclusion. But unless by 'gut feeling' you mean a valid argument with true premises, then gut feelings can't prove anything wrong. Perhaps, though that wouldn't speak to whether or not morality is logical. If Wai Dai's point is that morality is, at best, axiomatic, then sure. But so is Peano arithmetic, and that's as logical as can be.