These are just starting points. I do think goals are themselves good or bad, but it's much harder to explain how you can objectively make assertions like that, so I wanted to make the lesser claim, for now: there are ways to explore morality objectively.
I'm definitely not claiming consistency of this sort is the only criterion of morality. Only that it's an important and objective one.
I don't mean to be a tease, but if I say too many things at once, I won't be understood as well. On the other hand, threads here go stale fast (usually in under a day), so I'm not sure how to ever get very far in explaining, here. By contrast, on another forum, I am in a thread that has been going for 4 years. And it's only 180 comments long -- so around 1 comment per 8 days.
I'll keep posting here if anyone replies. Or contact me, curi42 on AIM or curi@curi.us
So for depth, my best idea so far is to link longer, external writing. Here are two things I wrote about morality which explain my views a bit more:
Ah, good. I figured I wasn't getting the whole picture. Something similar to objectivism makes sense to me. I think there is such a thing as human nature, so everyone is ultimately made happy by the same things, at a certain granularity. Morality's objectively good goal, in your framework, is to maximize happiness.
However, at this point I have to veer into territory considered "religious," because such a claim requires at least an element of non-materialism to make sense of our moral intuitions.
At any rate, my views are not rigorously defined enough, and I'd benefit from critical, constructive discussion. I'll check out your links and see if I can participate.
I don't think there is any such thing as 'human nature', though I do think there is a lot of complex knowledge in cultures that achieves some of the same practical results.
I don't think the purpose of morality, or life, is to maximize happiness. I suspect maximizing happiness is consistent with the right way of life, if you understand enough, but I don't think it's the best way to look at things, and I think it makes it harder to see the answers.
In general, ideas don't need foundations. "You can't justify that," is not a valid criticism. This includes moral ideas. So if you have a "moral intuition", or think a common sense notion of morality makes sense, but can't justify it perfectly, I don't think that's a problem. It may be a sign of religion, but not a bad one.
The correct way to look at ideas is not to seek justification, but instead to compare them to rival theories. In other words, ask, "Got a better idea?" If there is no rival theory, then criticism is sort of useless. It can help us notice we'd like a better theory and find places to look for new ideas. But without a rival theory to compare with, we can't see which theory seems truer, or which stands up to criticism better, and can't abandon the current theory.
The ideas about foundations and justifications here were best explained in published work by Karl Popper, and also somewhat by David Deutsch (but more to come, he should have a new book out within 2 years). They are not especially popular, but in my judgment they actually make sense, unlike all the rival philosophies.
If you read Popper, be aware that he never wrote much applying his ideas to morality or education. He wrote a lot about science, and about communism and historicism, and also about certain (bad) schools of philosophy, but also explained epistemology in abstract.
Guess that's long enough for now. For what it's worth, I like fielding (non-hostile) questions in these areas.
Deutsch only has one book out, which is very good. My only warning is that half of it is sort of off topic (physics, virtual reality, computation, time travel). But that's ok, because of the density of ideas fit into each chapter.
Popper has lots of books. Maybe The Myth of the Framework is a good choice. As I recall, it has content from lectures he gave to people not already familiar with his philosophy, so those parts are especially clear and accessible.
Proposing an actual moral goal is tricky, because we have to be careful to keep separate the issues of whether there are true moral ideas, and whether my particular idea is true. And very strictly, my idea will not be true. It will have truth to it, but not be perfect. Which may be a confusing concept, because the prevailing epistemology says that knowledge is "justified, true belief" by which it means 100% absolutely, perfectly true. That perspective discounts any possibility of "partial truths" as knowledge. Further, it encourages people to believe they possess (final, certain) truths. But I don't claim to have any of those, nor do I think one can have those.
If you're OK with all that, I can tell you some tentative guesses at moral truths.
To any disagreeable people reading this: please bear in mind that if you say the following ideas are incorrect, and that therefore I am incorrect to say morality can be approached objectively ... you will be contradicting yourself, because you will have made an assertion about the objective truth of the matter (that I am, in fact, mistaken).
So some good goals, in my opinion:
Long term: open-ended knowledge creation
Medium term: cure aging, invent self-replicating nanobots, win war on terror, write important book, invent AI
Short term: make a sandwich, be kind to one's children, quit smoking, make a useful product, solve a problem you were having, learn how to play Mario Galaxy well
None of these are (I imagine) especially odd. That is because we have to start where we are. We already have goals. Most of them are good goals to pursue, for now. In the event we decide we want something better, or see a problem with them, we should seek to make (gradual) improvements. So, nothing revolutionary here. In fact, while I think most people are mistaken about moral philosophy, I don't have a problem with most of their actual ideas about how to live day to day. We have the most peaceful, cooperative, and effective civilization ever to exist; or, in other words, we have the most knowledge of morality that has ever existed. Average people have this, and use it in their routine lives.
Can we do even better? Of course. But most of my suggestions are not about changing one's goals, but instead about changing how one tries to accomplish them. So, for example, it is very important to enjoy criticism. This is common knowledge, but people still have trouble with it, and often don't fully understand the reasons it's important. To sketch out my answer, criticism stabilizes true ideas (because they withstand it better than their rivals), while an environment without criticism does not differentiate truth and falsity. And criticism is a means of error correction. Error correction is the only way to reliably achieve any goal. There is no way to reliably come up with the right approach, initially, so anyone who wants to consistently succeed has to be able to find and correct errors.
Why do people dislike criticism, anyway? They take it personally. They hear that they are mistaken, or bad, but they want to be right. That is an irrational and ineffective attitude towards life. If you want to be right, the only path forward is to be willing to change what you are, until you are what's right. And whether you are criticized or not does not change whether you are mistaken. It only changes whether you find out about it. That is a gift. Instead of being mistaken and ignorant, you have a change to change your mind.
So to tie this back to what I was saying earlier, one of the common points for the best way to accomplish many different goals, is to enjoy criticism. Alternative approaches such as disliking and avoiding (some) criticism are immoral, because they sabotage achieving one's goals. The more distasteful you find criticism, the less reliably you can accomplish what you want to.
To add to this, we could go through all the different attitudes which are important to learning and problem solving in general, and list them as important pieces of morality. They are all fundamental to how we should live.
> you will be contradicting yourself, because you will have made an assertion about the objective truth of the matter
...unless I assert that morality is subjective. :-)
As for the rest of it ... well, I do disagree. I think Guy Kawasaki outlined it best in his book, "Rules for Revolutionaries". It has a section titled, if I remember correctly, "Don't let bozosity get you down".
A certain amount of criticism that a person will encounter will be, well, wrong. It can even be wrong when it's coming from an expert. You see this all the time in the business world. I can't tell here if you're suggesting that a person take all criticism to heart -- I think so, because of the way you talk about changing to adapt to criticism -- but, if you are, then you're suggesting that a person allow themselves to be buffeted by the winds of the popular and the trendy.
There's no way to always to always be correct, to always do the right thing. You might listen to a bunch of criticism, and a bunch of suggestions, and still make the wrong decision for all the right reasons. Listening to more criticism, and allowing that criticism to further change your habits, doesn't necessarily ameliorate that.
I counter that it's important to know when to accept criticism, and when to ignore it and forge ahead. I also posit that it's impossible to know that, so you just have to make your best guess.
Regarding subjectivity, if you assert morality is subjective, you don't have a leg to stand on in saying I was wrong. What would that even mean? I was right, for me, or whatever.
Regarding "forging ahead": Scheduling criticism is a different issue, and one well known to writers: if you keep editing the first chapter, you'll never finish. There certainly is a place for that kind of thing. It is really a separate (and large) issue.
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Of course you have to use your judgment about which criticism you think is correct. The point is not to dislike criticism generally, or to ignore it. Doing those things makes it harder to find and use good criticism.
To use a YC example, some people have posted here asking for comments and criticism for their fledgling startup. And people have blogged about how this criticism was harsh and hard to take, but made their startup better, so they encourage others to ask for comments/criticism as well.
This illustrates a few different attitudes. There are some people who are too scared of criticism to ask for any. Their startups won't get the improvement that some more bold or open minded people have gotten.
And then of the people who did ask for criticism, many still partially dislike it, which makes it harder to fairly evaluate the criticism (finding it somewhat painful is distracting!), and their distaste makes them overlook some other, more subtle opportunities to get more criticism, that a person who loves criticism would have found.
So this is an important and relevant issue even at an exceptionally enlightened place. There is no magic formula to always make correct decisions, but there are ways of life which are more effective and reliable.
> Regarding subjectivity, if you assert morality is subjective, you don't have a leg to stand on in saying I was wrong.
Well, subjectivity doesn't mean you're right in the objective sense. See, you opened your comment with a logical trick to prove the correctness of what you were about to say before you even said it, and you did so by deciding that there are intrinsically right and wrong moral decisions. I think that morality, specifically, happens to be an extremely subjective thing, first of all. It varies dramatically from culture to culture, society to society, era to era. Secondly, I think that was kind of an underhanded thing to do, and a friendly jest was my way of calling you on it. If I were to pull an equally underhanded trick, I might say that my reply is in fact a criticism of your thinking, and, according to your own principles, you must take it under consideration and use it to change the way you act.
> The point is not to dislike criticism generally, or to ignore it.
This part I like. It makes me really want to agree with what you're trying to say. But, then you go from that, to things like, "...more subtle opportunities to get more criticism, that a person who loves criticism would have found." I have a problem with that, because I think of criticism as a distraction that is sometimes an opportunity. To really love criticism is to dwell on what will ultimately be a distraction.
I really wish I could find my copy of Rules for Revolutionaries. (I really dig that book, and it was signed! Sometimes I loan it out ... rats.) It cited some specific examples of this, sometimes where businesses had too closely followed criticism and been hurt by that, and others where they hadn't followed it, and benefited from that.
So, it's not just scheduling criticism. In the book writing example, sometimes you have to know when to ignore your editor altogether.
I agree with the logic trick part. To say something is undecidable is to make an objective claim.
However, at the point where you want to say someone should or should not do something the subjective morality comes back to bite you (saying curi's trick was underhanded). I think this is curi's point.
All you can really do with subjective morality is describe your rationale for why you do what you do, and hope the other person buys it. Even that is inconsistent because you are motivated by the thought that the other person should do something.
Curi, while it is true we start from first impressions, either our goals have to be mutually independent, or they must have a common foundation. Otherwise they end up contradicting each other. That's the point of moral philosophy, and what I meant by justifying moral intuition.
Regarding contradicting goals: I think the way to tie things together is a common endpoint (the truth of the matter). If you move all your goals in that direction, it will cause them to become progressively less contradictory.
You can also remove contradictions locally if you find any. If you want, you can say that is based on the common foundation "if two ideas contradict, at least one is false". But the point is, you see a contradiction, you know at least one of the ideas is mistaken in some way, so you know there's room for improvement there, until you come up with some changes that remove the contradiction.
Yes, I agree with the end point. I think morals are properly posed in teleological terms. So, moral philosophy has to do with determining the end. What are our goals aiming at?
What we should aim for, in the long term, is a tough question. But fortunately we don't need to know that, now. What's much easier is determining some good short term goals, and then after completing them, determining the next set of short term goals. In that way, we can make progress indefinitely, without ever seeing especially far ahead.
But certainly seeing as much of an "ultimate purpose" to aim for, as we can, is helpful. We have ideas of parts of it. Creating knowledge is good, and destroying it is bad. Freedom is good, and controlling other people is at best a temporary stopgap measure, not an ideal. Cooperation or indifferent tolerance is good, and violent conflict is bad, both because it's destructive, and because it's not a truth seeking process. Settling for less is not ideal, and anything that puts pressure on people, or creates incentives, to not strive for all we can, is bad.
Some of these assertions have directly applicability today. For example, the common perception that striving for more is "hard" (unpleasant) indicates something or other is going wrong. Or there's the idea that life is about compromise, which is essentially settling for less. People don't just fail to find a with to proceed with no downsides, but often people don't even try, and assume such things do not exist. The ideas in our culture which cause these attitudes clearly have room for improvement.
"moral philosophy has to do with determining the end"
Yes, but that's not all. How to approach goals, how to solve problems and correct errors, what sorts of policies for how to live your life are effective, are also very important topics (and perhaps more accessible and directly useful). One of the critical ideas here, I think, is that all these things depend on knowledge. How do you approach a goal? In general, you need to create knowledge about the goal and how best to approach it (and also whether it's worth accomplishing, in case it was mistaken). To solve a problem, you have to figure out how to solve it. (And if implementing the solution is hard or unpleasant in any way, that could be avoided with still more knowledge of how to solve the problem in an easier way.) To correct errors, you have to create knowledge of what ideas are in error, and what would be better ideas. And so on. And therefore, anyone who is seriously interested in morality ought to study epistemology.
Regarding criticism, perhaps we can agree that enjoying and seeking out good criticism is important. That means, for example, if you know a source that has a good chance to provide some partially true criticism you may not have thought of, then it'd be a good idea to ask for it, and to like that kind of experience.
On the other hand, if you judge a source of criticism is going to be a waste of time, then it's fine to skip it. Not because you would ever ignore or disregard a criticism without thinking about it, and definitely not due to disliking criticism, but just because you reasonably expect they'd give criticism you'd already considered and rejected, and you have better things to do that you judge will bear more fruit.
The reason I'm not too worried about drowning in low quality criticism is that if there is no new information, it only takes a few moments to properly address. You don't have to ignore it because it's such a fast process. Just remember your take on the subject, verify that it already addresses what's being said, and then you're done. Don't even reply. But I don't call that "ignoring it", since you do quickly think about it, and if you notice there is something new to you, it will get proper consideration.
Regarding subjectivity, I intended no trick. I'll drop it after this comment, and you can have the last word if you want.
I'm not even going to make a full argument, but I do want to point out that if people from many cultures/eras/etc have different ideas about something, that is not evidence that there isn't a truth of the matter. If there is a truth of the matter, we still wouldn't expect them to all have found it.
I'm definitely not claiming consistency of this sort is the only criterion of morality. Only that it's an important and objective one.
I don't mean to be a tease, but if I say too many things at once, I won't be understood as well. On the other hand, threads here go stale fast (usually in under a day), so I'm not sure how to ever get very far in explaining, here. By contrast, on another forum, I am in a thread that has been going for 4 years. And it's only 180 comments long -- so around 1 comment per 8 days.
I'll keep posting here if anyone replies. Or contact me, curi42 on AIM or curi@curi.us
So for depth, my best idea so far is to link longer, external writing. Here are two things I wrote about morality which explain my views a bit more:
Essay: http://www.curi.us/blog/post/1252-xii
Dialog: http://www.curi.us/blog/post/1169-morality