This piece is Part 1 of 2. Later today, for Thorough Thursday, we'll dive deeper into a question raised in the backdrop of a philosophy essay from 1972, Peter Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality".
It's not that the paper's core argument isn't compelling; it's that Singer's challenge to individual morality raises a bigger question about the very nature of morality - and our world's ability to achieve it.
#Philosophy #Humanism #GlobalHumanism
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/is-it-possible-to-be-good-in-our
@MLClark I've always seen others' morality as being defined by the society in which they live.
The Aztecs saw human sacrifice as not just moral, but righteous.
Many in bygone days saw speaking against the lord/king of their land as immoral.
Many Romans saw war & conquest in the name of Empire as righteous.
Of course, if your moral system is based on civilization-scale outcomes (that's me!), a lot of that subjectivity disappears... but everyone else's moral system starts to look nonsensical.
Yep, that's the gist of it.
Except that I disagree that you're as "objective" as you think you are.
Your notions of civilization-scale outcomes are still informed by your subject-position and its exposure sets.
It's very common for people to think that they're accessing a higher-level "objectivity" by talking in abstract or at scale, though.
(Amusingly, it's especially common within a certain thread of so-called "rationalist" discourse very much tethered to our culture too.)
@MLClark I never claim to be perfectly objective - only more so than most, which admittedly is a very low bar.
The key difference is that I can, and often do, wrap my head around all the competing perspectives on an issue at once, as well as set aside emotion and think about an issue more (although far from perfectly!) rationally.
And I tend to think in terms of that which can be empirically measured.
So if subjectivity <-> objectivity is a continuum, I'm further from the former than most.
That's the mistake in your argumentation, though - you keep using the word "rationally" as if there's such a thing as mental processing removed from the material condition of the mind, when we know full well that thinking is always informed by emotion.
I say this as a strongly empirical humanist, and one who routinely touts the importance of holding ideas in tension: one is at greatest risk of "irrational" thinking when they act like there's a binary between reason and emotion.
We are in firm disagreement on this one.
I'm just off to bed or I'd pull the research on this, but empirical thinking requires taking into consideration the knowledge our species has acquired about its neural processes.
While it is certainly a fundamental to critical thinking to engage in strategies to reduce the impact of kneejerk first reactions - the core of a humanities education - you keep claiming an
"objective" position can be achieved from a specific subject-position.
I don't doubt that you might feel like you make decisions more calmly than those around you - I can't speak to the kinds of people you know - but I've seen some of your "civilization-scale" "objective" moral conclusions, and they're not even close to atypical for your subject-position and its common info silos.
It's like the classic XKCD comic, Sheeple: we tend to assume that we hold only carefully reasoned views, while everyone around us is simply a slave to convention/emotion.
If I've been a touch firm on this point, though, I should mention that it comes from having long ago been caught up in that whole misguided rhetoric of rationalism myself, back in the good ol' early 00s, when debate circuits were all the rage.
Moving into a more fully empirical mindset meant onboarding the fruits of human behaviour studies, and the wealth of insights they contain to belie the myth of "higher" reasoning.
But here's that Sheeple comic, for a wee laugh instead.
@MLClark Not a fully objective position, a *relatively* objective position. That is, taking into account a greater fraction of the space of possible perspectives than that used to produce alternative positions.
True objectivity is, of course, impossible - for that, one would have to be omniscient and capable of fully computing all the implications of every relevant datapoint, then solving for the point of maximal intersection in the space of all possible utility functions...
@MLClark The impossibility of it renders it meaningless for the purposes of civil discourse - because it is impossible for any real system to achieve true objectivity, there is no reason to even reference it in such discourse... and as such when objectivity is referenced with respect to the product of a human being, it only makes sense to interpret that as denoting its closest feasible approximate under the circumstances.
That conclusion doesn't follow seamlessly from your premise, because we live in a culture that is teeming with people with a distorted sense of their capacity for "objective" thinking. (And also of other capabilities; most people assume they're higher than average for intellectual attributes.)
That's why I raise the warning about the declaration of one's superior capacity for higher reasoning. It's an overconfidence that can leave us more vulnerable to fallacy-ridden thought.
@MLClark Ah, I see your point - in essence, those with faulty perspectives may think they are achieving the impossible (true objectivity) when in fact they are not... and so they refer to said impossibility as if they have achieved it, even though they of course have not.
Perhaps that could be addressed by adopting a broader interpretation of "closest feasible approximate" and a wider scope for "circumstances"? 😉
I'd reframe the issue as a consequentialist concern:
The claim to greater objectivity (however relative!) is not a neutral act, but rather, one that puts the host at greater risk of poorer reasoning going forward, from overconfidence in their "higher" reasoning at all.
We've seen this happen with great frequency when people are elevated *for* their critical thinking; they come to take for granted the quality of their thought, and this makes them more vulnerable to future error.
@MLClark It would seem to me that one would be less likely to become overconfident if one were to define higher reasoning as requiring thorough consideration of all (non-spurious) new information presented, extensive re-analysis upon even the slightest hint an error may have been made, and most importantly correction rather than masking of errors.
It is easy to assume oneself correct over another; it is not so easy to analyze & integrate every step of their process before reaching a conclusion.
Indeed, and that's where it becomes critical to remember the material nature of thought, and to avoid stark binaries between reason and emotion.
The "higher reasoning" you reference is only feasible when one is acutely aware of the susceptibility all humans have to external stressors acting adversely on habituated biochemical responses.
But remaining alert is a full-time job, which leaves no time to boast of its fruits. You and I must always do that work: no resting on laurels!
@MLClark Indeed, I think many would do well to recall that nearly everything beyond the quantum scale in this universe - our brains included - is fundamentally analog in nature... there are few stark binaries to be found outside of human abstractions, & those abstractions merely paint over the messiness of reality.
Absolutely. Perhaps in one sense my misfortune is a gift - being unable to recall experiencing the past means a reminder of my fallibility is never more than a moment away.
Agreed!
Splendid chat last night, Torin. Thanks for engaging in it with me. 👌🏻
Best wishes as you move through the messy fray of humanity today. 😉
@MLClark Likewise to you! 😄
May the world bring you good tidings.
@MLClark It's not a mistake.
It's possible to utilize active compensation techniques, self-blinding (through the use of opaque intermediate abstractions, among other things), and manipulation of one's own internal state (eg: empathy suppression, dissociation) to reduce the impact of emotion on one's thought processes - not eliminate it entirely, unfortunately, but it can massively diminish it.
I often use many such methods in concert when a decision is of sufficient import.