Metaethics - Moral Underdetermination

This video outlines Marius Baumann's underdetermination argument against moral realism.

0:00 - Introduction
0:32 - Parfit's Triple Theory
4:46 - Two elements of a moral theory
6:43 - Underdetermination
10:04 - Are the theories equally believable?
20:00 - When should belief be withheld?
26:32 - Is this a challenge to realism?

-- Baumann, Marius. (2022). "Moral underdetermination and a new skeptical challenge." Synthese 200:208.
-- James, William. (1896). "The will to believe." In The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, ed. William James: 1-15. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.
-- Parfit, Derek. (2011). On What Matters: Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[KaneB]

Moral Disagreement:

Underdetermination in Science:

Marquis de Sade's Moral Philosophy:

[IapitusMcHeimer]

The more I watch your philosophy videos, I definitely get a better understanding of moral philosophy, but I also realize that it's really hard to actually find the terms to describe one's own moral position. I wish there was some like reverse dictionary to find the academic version of general moral and philosophical ideas. I love philosophy, but i usually dont engage with it using much jargon outside of specific unique concepts. It's wild to me that (if I understand these terms right) one could believe there are objective elements of morality, believe that there are universal moral truths relative to humans, and believe morality is bound by logic yet not be considered a moral realist. I'm half writing this comment to drive the algorithm, but the feeling of lacking the proper terms to articulate my positions frequently plagues me when Watching your videos

[tefkah]

uh oh gang, how will moral realism get out of this sticky situation?

[therealb]

So a lot of these logic, morals, ethics, comes under philosophy.

I have been thinking of these topics for sometime now. Re discovering a lot of ideas philosophy. But there is an entire subject on these dilemmas.

Subscribed!

[hian]

Personally, my biggest issue with moral realism, or rather moralism as a whole, is that I don't think it is apparent on any view in the relevant schools of thought what it actually means to make deontic verdicts and why the metric of the deontic verdict ought to be valued in the first place.

Simply put, all moralisms seem to reduce into eternal regress once you ask why exactly their particular metric is what it is and why you ought respect it.

What's worse, the verdicts themselves seem neutered and pointless in the large scheme of things whenever any particular one of them conflicts with an individual preference that said individual possesses the means to pursue and/or actualize if and when the moralists are powerless to prevent it anyways.

Thus, whether a virtue ethicist and a social contractarian can arrive at equivalent verdicts seems like a red herring and in no way intersects in a case for their view.

Ultimately, their verdicts are grounded in decreeing, by definition, that their respective metrics for judgements ought be the standard for understanding when an act is right or wrong(I.E it's a good act if it is virtous/respecting social contracts/propagating well-being/reducing suffering), however no argument can ever be provided for why the definition should be granted outside of practical concerns.

As a thought experiment, imagine that you stand in front of a box with a big red button.

If you push it, you will doom all other conscious life in the universe to an eternal state of maximum suffering but you will be consigned to a state of everlasting bliss in a separate reality. You will also have any memories of having done this wiped from your mind and you will suffer no consequences for doing so.

I suppose most people and moral systems would consider this a heinous thing to do. And yet, there seems to be no compelling reason why the individual shouldn't do this. No appeal can be made to consequence for the person pushing the button, and any appeal not rooted in personal consequences raises a separate, and to my mind, fatal question for systems that posit deontic verdicts separate from individual consequence—

Namely, if a moral system posits normative demands that don't favor the clearly best outcomes for the individuals laden with it, what possible reason could they have to respect its metric of value or its verdicts in the first place? Why, given no substantive reason, should the individual care to act for the sake of avoiding the label "evil", or in pursuit of the label "good", if it is not aligned with their preferences or best outcomes?

And, even if, for whatever contrived reason, the proponents of these systems feel like reserving the label of "evil" for those who reject the metric and subsequent verdicts, what purpose does the label or exercise even serve?

Okay. The man or woman who pressed the button is "evil". Now what?

Presumably there ought be a purpose to the attribution of the label – it being, in many ways, a condensed form of expression towards a normative demand(asking by implication the individual to stop being evil, or for others to rise up and interfere with the person's evil). But, insofar as that appeal requires the argument or moral system to begin with – and insofar that the argument has already failed to provide any incentive to the agent with the button – it betrays the vaccuous nature of the entire exercise.

Ultimately, morality and moralisms just come off to me as ad-hoc intellectualizations of human preferences, crafted for the sake of justifying an internal "moral license" to act against certain impulses or to superimpose one's preferences onto others or pursue conflict where non-violent superimposition has failed.

This, however, does not require its own obtuse language game or faux rightousness fueled by contrived and incoherent ideas about reality.

If it were my preference to relish in the suffering and blood-shed of my fellow man, then I would be at an impass with most people and we would be forced to resolve that issue through either dialogue or force, wholly separate from any pointless conversation on which of us are supposedly "good" or "evil".

If our preferences are anything from nominally aligned to very close in nature, our ability to compromise and find mutually agreeable states of existence is possible and often trivial(hence why so many systems arrive at similar decrees and judgements), again, without any need for or anything added by moralistic language.

There are no oughts. Only what is. And, the successful coexistence of conscious creatures is just an exercise in the balancing of preferences to whatever extent they can – which agents would pursue regardless insofar it's necessary for them to achieve their individual ends whether they engage in mental gymnastics to provide a normative framework beforehand or not.

Yours truly,
Friendly neighborhood nihilist.

[Jupa]

Personally I just consider that Carthage must be destroyed

[IPlayWithFire]

Keep going my friend. One day you'll have 300k+ views on your videos.

[TheNaturalLawInstitute]

Hmm... (a) Morality refers to the terms of the demand for cooperation (positiva) and demand for retaliation for violation of terms of cooperation (negativa) (b) morality always and everywhere on earth consists of reciprocity in demonstrated interests within limits of proportionality - that's the empirical evidence. (c) that definition is the formal law of morality AND the common law - which demonstrates by convergence everywhere (d) those conditions of reciprocity and proportionality differ in each civilizational context because of the degree of development, and the degree of development the atomization of rules from tribe to clan to family to the individual - but the rule is invariant. (e) Reciprocity provides universal decidability (as we have found in international law); AND due to contextual (environmental) differences, moral portfolios differ by civilization, culture, class, and sex; AND individual moral demand for cooperation given our temperament (personality), sex, class, culture, and civilizational differences combined with indoctrination, education, and random experience. (f) regardless of our individual intuitions, perceptions, and reason the universal law of moral decidability in reciprocity in demonstrated interests AND by variation in the limits of proportionality within group AND by variation in the limits of proportionality by individual, and variation in his or her demands for cooperation remains the same.
Ergo the silver rule is correct, because of the increased burden of knowledge not the golden which requires no knowledge - because we are unequal.
I have found no moral question undecidable (and I have had to address hundreds of them). Instead, I have found variations in WHO decides each: the individual to the polity to laws of nature.
So moral realism exists, and is true and. universal. But that's akin to saying that the laws of logic are true and universal. We can determine if questions are logical or moral (true or false) or whether they remain undecidable, and whether they are undecidable by the individual, the group, the polity, the world. But as far as I know there are no moral questions that are not decidable by the laws of the four sciences. And that claim has only been possible in this new century.
General Tip: Philosophy is to sets and mathematics and Science is to operations and computation. AFAIK the science tells us that morality tells us only that which is not bad (universal) but not what is good (particular). Philosophy provides us means of determining which of those things it is not bad (not immoral) provides best individual and group return for some individual or subgroup and once in a while the majority of the group, but almost never everyone. So AFAIK science (truth, decidabilty) and philosophy (value, choice) are fully disambiguated.
-Curt Doolittle, The Natural Law Institute

[SerifSansSerif]

Somewhere around the 15 minute mark you start talking about moral intuition and it feels like Hume is worthy of mention as the gut moral reaction is that of a virtue we wish to implement, and then what follows is the ethical framework to justify the value.

Also, rather than an assumption that one ethical framework is right and others are wrong, why not assume that virtues exist within our realm of experience in a way similar to emotions in their universal understanding and appeal, and that ethical systems are the methodologies we utilize to try and best gauge a course of action towards the fulfillment of that virtue.

Laws, are formalized maxims based on our ethics. Just as we can easily find instances where the law can subvert or betray the ethics of a situation, ethical frameworks typically have faults and paradoxes within them. Kant's ethics are a gold standard, but at the same time can be a bit too inflexible and when you can't lie even though telling the truth will cause harm, for example, it may be a question more suited to using a utilitarian form of ethics to subvert the crisis by stating the least violation is in lying despite the paradox.

Another form of ethics might better fill in for when we encounter the problem of utilitarianism such as Kant's ethics when we got a situation where there's juuuust a little too much calculus going on and we justify making another suffer.

Mind you I'm being fairly loose and free, but the point being that there's other options than a very black and white approach to ethics, especially when ethics are not facts, but methodologies.

[brettlemoine]

What is the reasoning behind the idea that one _must_ choose to believe (or endorse) a _single_ moral theory? If we understand our moral intuitions as the result of aeons of psychological evolution as members of a social species, then there's no particular reason that they'd necessarily converge to a single conceptual theory. The construction of moral theories seems to be an attempt to sort of reverse-engineer the results, but using _very_ different tools than evolution. Further most moral theories (as far as I've looked) tend to overlook the way that human behaviors and moral intuitions _change_ based on in-group and out-group dynamics.

[Locreai]

I just started working on this thesis. Can you tell me what you think???

[Ansatz]

Moral disagreement counts in favor of moral realism, not against it. It makes no sense to debate an issue unless there is some truth to be discovered about that issue. People would not usually debate the beauty of a painting because beauty is usually taken to be in the eye of the beholder. We may debate the skill of the painter, but the beauty itself is just a matter of how we feel about the painting. The only people who might reasonably debate the beauty are those who think that beauty has some objective reality so that people can be mistaken in their judgement of beauty. So every time people debate any moral issue, that speaks to those people having some conception of morality that somehow places it in objective reality.

Most moral realists probably think that judging morality by intuition is ridiculous. If something has objective reality then we judge it by examining that objective reality, not by examining our internal intuitions. Just as it would be ridiculous to judge the height of the Eiffel tower by intuition instead of by measurement, so intuitions should be irrelevant to moral judgement from the perspective of a moral realist.

[InventiveHarvest]

If philosophy students were required to learn multivariate calculus, they could see which moral theories held up to mathematical scrutiny.