Discussion regarding Dcleve's assertion moral intuition

DKing

14:59

As this can go very long, I am starting a chat here to discuss the applicability of moral intuitions and their ability to evaluate deities in general, but specifically for this conversation with regard to Islam. I contend that one must first show how humans can have a claim to some sort of objective moral knowledge, which itself seems to contradict experience.

Dcleve

17:46

@DKing All humans have moral intuitions, and these intuitions are accurate/useful enough for we humans to develop functional societies based on them. This demonstrated empirical success of moral intuitions I believe puts the burden of justification on you to reject them.

Dcleve

18:20

As a specific obligation, we humans face uncertainty in all our information. IF one is a mystic, as Mohammed was, THEN one faces a challenge as to the validity of claimed communications one gets from mystic sources. Most religions are based on mystic revelation, and they contradict each other. Therefore, any mystic must accept that their source of info may not be 100% accurate or trustworthy, and they need to use validity checks to evaluate it.

DKing

Utility doesn't prove accuracy. People still planted crops by the cycles of the Sun when they thought it was pulled across the sky by chariots. Even if you were given the benefit of the doubt, no single moral belief is shared universally and many "intuitively moral" things for one group are "intuitively immoral" for another. The only time people seem to agree is when there is a shared religion, and often to the extent that religion is enforced.

Dcleve

Any mystic guidance that rejects validity checking based on morality, or valid reasoning, is not a reliable source. And it is definitely NOT from an omni-God!

For non-mystics, one likewise faces multiple competing religious (and non-religious) claims to justification. And comparative evaluation of their morality, reasoning quality, and basic intellectual honesty, is basically an obligation for anyone considering accepting one as a valid worldview.

DKing

I'm not arguing here that Muhammad was right. I don't believe he was, and I'm not even convinced that he thought he was right. That is a much different conversation. If, however, Muhammad were right, and if his information were coming from Allah, and assuming further that Allah was also being truthful with us and our only source of omniscience, then the only ability we would have to weigh his morality would be through what he revealed. Anything else is subjective and meaningless.

There is no validity checking based upon morality in the same way that there is no validity checking of physics based upon what somebody would wish the laws of physics to be like.

Dcleve

Mohammed endorsed the Jewish books as valid, and the very first one says that we humans have as valid an ability to sort moral from immoral as God does. That was the power transferred by eating the apple. Claims that we do not have valid moral discernment, or reasoning discernment, are self-contradictory for any Abrahamic religion.

DKing

We cannot judge a religious belief system or any other truth based upon whether or not we like what it says or whether it matches our intuition. At best, we can discover what that system says about our intuition and if that is or is not reflected in our experience of our intuition. For instance, if a belief system said nobody likes grape ice cream but you like grape ice cream, then there is a conflict. But if it says that grape ice cream is bad, we cannot independently verify this.

Dcleve

18:28

You appear to be applying an inappropriate standard of perfection to moral intuitions. NONE of our ability to sense the world is perfect. That our moral intuitions are sometimes imperfect, AND that they are skewed b our socialization in a particular culture. are both true. But these points do not refute that we can and do have a valid moral intuition.

DKing

Incorrect. The Bible, what Muhammad endorsed, does not indicate that humans have the ability to discern right morality. It does say that, being in the image of God we have some sense in which we know that there is right and wrong. However, that sense is not granular enough to detect what is right and wrong, especially because of the fallen nature. There are many Bible verses in the OT and the NT (both of which Muhammad endorsed to some extent) which describe our fallibility of morality.

If we cannot accurately discern morality, then we cannot know which morality we got right. We could not independently know whether Moses (in that story) was right or wrong. We would have to appeal to some standard which would not be prone to such error.

Dcleve

Both critiques are true to varying degrees of all our senses. Yet we can still discern a world, and with testing and correction, we can form both valid physical and moral models of our universe.

If the Koran denies that the speculation, test, modification process can be applied to our world models, leading incrementally to better models, then it fails yet another test against our world.

DKing

We cannot confirm independently that our empirical senses are accurate, either. We must rely upon aspects of our core beliefs (here, the religious system) to tell us to what extent these senses are reliable. The same would be true for moral systems, and the two are not required to be equally as valid.

Dcleve

As for morality, humans have developed several global models that are widely respected cross-culturally. These include Utilitarianism, Rights ethics, and Love and Truth virtue ethics. There are a few more, such as Kantian moral obligations, and Rawls theory of justice, that are also pretty respected, but not as widespread in their acceptance. These 3-5 converge on almost all moral questions.

DKing

We have no reason to assume that "our world" even exists, let alone that it must be able to provide any such tests. These affirmations come instead from some core beliefs, not necessarily from some independent faculty.

Dcleve

18:38

The rejection of pragmatism in favor of unachievable absolutes is a well known dead end in reasoning and philosophy. If that is what you are resorting to, any pragmatist will just dismiss your perfectionism as an impossible standard fallacy.

DKing

No moral modals are respected universally. To the extent that some are popular, they are so because of shifting cultural and political influences and these have always fluctuated. Regardless, consensus does not imply validity. That's the ad populum fallacy.

Dcleve

I am a mystic. I know the unreliability of mystical insights, and they are themselves far LESS reliable than our moral intuitions. Use of moral screening is an essential step in evaluation of mystic guidance, to sift out both the self serving "Son of Sam's" and the self-deceptive "I thought this myself" noise that comes thru a mystic channel.

DKing

I am not here arguing pragamtism one way or another. I am arguing that you have no way to counter divine revelation from omnipotence using fallible and imprecise consensus by a subset of people.

Dcleve

All empiricism ultimately relies upon consensus as our goodness metric for evaluating truth. All our sensing is fallible, as is all our reasoning. Mutual cross check is how we discover errors in our sensing, and reasoning. Your rejection of peer review and consensus, leaves you with NO truth criteria, for anything. Once more, that is an impossible standard fallacy.

DKing

I'll agree that mystical insights are unreliable. So, I'm not trying to hit such a low bar. I think there are good things which do help to rule out mystical thinking, but those are simply things that rule out other things like thought experiments. Part of that has to do, in my estimation, with things like reliable acquisition of knowledge. It would seem that if your system relies upon consensus, intuition, or other mutable methods, then I would say that your opposition is likewise mutable.

Dcleve

18:48

Mutability is part of the human condition. See Karl Popper on Objective Knowledge. All reasoning, all science, all empiricism ultimately is a pragmatic exercise.

DKing

Reason is not impossible. It just doesn't work for a lot of unreasonable models. Reason is not mutable and it is not dependent upon consensus. I reject Popper and Scientism. I reject Islam, too, but if you're going to do it, you need to do it objectively rather than merely stating that it doesn't match your beliefs or the beliefs of some other person.

Dcleve

The cross-cultural recognition of the admirability of saints, and the cross-culture close approximation of Virtue ethic, utilitarianism, and rights ethic with the objective morality we can sense, provide a reasonably reliable reference suite for evaluating the morality of a mystic insight, a religious dogma, or a God's characteristics. IF one accepts objective morality, THEN Gods can be immoral, and amoral, and one can discover this.

Popper was a vociferous and vocal critic of scientism. His extension of methodological naturalism deep into philosophy is not scientism. Our non-science subject areas are empirical, but do not and cannot follow the formalism of science.

DKing

Consensus is not objective. Obviously, I'm going to reject your assertion that your "moral intuitions" are the right and only valid ones. I think most Muslims would also. Also your statement about people being able to discover morality for a god is unsubstantiated.

Dcleve

As Popper noted, likewise Nagle, objectivity is an impossible standard. There IS no "view from nowhere". If one particular culture rejects the morality that everyone else, cross-culturally, recognizes as valid, then the reasonable inference is that that particular culture embeds an immoral set of principles within itself. Your denial that one can even reference objective morality, or do a critique of a culture, directly contradicts what psychology says about human moral development:

Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development

Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development constitute an adaptation of a psychological theory originally conceived by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Kohlberg began work on this topic as a psychology graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1958 and expanded upon the theory throughout his life. The theory holds that moral reasoning, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for ethical behavior, has six developmental stages, each more adequate at responding to moral dilemmas than its predecessor. Kohlberg followed the development of moral judgment far beyond the ages studied...

Your claim that application of moral reasoning to God claims is "unsubstantiated" is silly. I substantiated the process by detailed example in my posted answer.

DKing

19:08

I am in favor of objective morality. I am not in favor of calling consensus or popular opinion "objective". You can talk all you want about whether a belief system agrees with you or agrees with a bunch of people, but it's just that, a comparison to your beliefs, not something that is relevant to the validity of the belief.

It seems that at this point, all you are doing is doubling down on your insistence that your personal frame of reference doesn't approve of the passage given. Nice story, but unfortunately irrelevant. I understand that you are passionate about this, and that's fine for you. Unfortunately, you simply cannot debate tastes and subjective feelings. So, there's probably nothing left to discuss here. Your personal feelings are noted.

Dcleve

19:24

@DKing I have detailed for you how all our knowledge for every aspect of our world is subjective, and this is intrinsic to the human condition. Our methods of science, informal empiricism, all non science knowledge areas such as history, art, literary criticism, mathematics, etc are all even more intrinsically subject to subjectivity. We postulate what objective reality might be, in the form of abstract models, and evaluate model fit quality. Subjectively.

Your insistence on objective knowledge is an impossible standard fallacy,a nd applies to NO aspect of our knowledge.

All or our knowledge areas have to deal with this intrinsic subjectivity, and we have developed methodologies to dramatically improve upon " tastes and subjective feelings". I cannot tell if you are in denial on this, or engaged in a dishonest straw man with that false claim.

Your focus seems to be to find rationalizations to deny that we can do moral evaluations. Of anything. To arrive at this conclusion, you have to either deny how we do knowledge in the entire rest of our subject areas, or make a special pleading exception for moral issues.

You have provided no rationale for why moral knowledge intrinsically cannot be developed like all our other knowledge, so I consider your conclusion to not EVEN be supported by such fallacies. It is a mere unsupported opinion.

And is likely driven by motivated reasoning.

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Discussion regarding Dcleve's asserti…