"Well, it's true for me ...."
Many students have a difficult time seeing a distinction between the following two statements:
a. It's true.
b. It's true for me.
But there IS a difference, and it is important to see the difference, and most people see the difference when it comes to things like mathematics, science, accounting, engineering, law, etc.
Here's the question: What does "for me" add to "It's true"? What I mean is, why would anyone say "It's true for me"? Let's say, for example, your favorite physics teacher asks you to tell her what the rate of fall is for a body located approximately at the surface of the Earth. Let's say that you are a student of physics and know with certainty, that bodies fall at 9.4 meters per second per second. If you write on your exam that bodies fall at 9.4 m/sec^2, your instructor would put an annoying red "X" next to your answer. (It should be 9.81)
"But wait a darn minute, there, ma'am: it's true for me that bodies fall at 9.4 m/sec^2!"
Relativism and Tolerance
What is the matter with the following claim:
"Different groups have different moral beliefs.
[One glance would show the absurdity of the logical extension of this argument. Disagreements in questions of history or biology or cosmology do not show that there are no facts about these subjects.]
Do you understand the reasons why such statements as "well it's true for them…" are confused and mistaken (with exceptions)?
Do you understand why such statements as "no one can tell me what to believe (or what to do)" doesn't work as a response to moral criticism? And why it isn't a very respectable or sophisticated response to differences in opinion? [Let's say a cashier in a supermarket who takes money from the cash register is approached by her boss. She defends herself: "No one can tell me what to do."
Let's say a private in the army does not know how to clean and reassemble a rifle.He is approached by his superior officer who tries to tell him how to do it. He answers: "No one can tell me what to think."]
Do you understand the reasons why such statements as "who needs morality?" are confused and mistaken (with exceptions)?
Do you understand the difference between the law and morality and why the law is an insufficient moral guide?
Do you understand how it is that humans get their views about morality? The various stages of development that many humans experience?
Morality is a social phenomenon. Think about this. If a person is alone on some deserted island would anything that person did be moral or immoral? That person may do things that increase or decrease the chance for survival or rescue but would those acts be moral or immoral? Most of what we are concerned with in Ethics is related to the situation in which humans are living with others. Humans are social animals. Society contributes to making humans what they are. For humans there arises the question of how are humans to behave toward one another. What are the rules to be? How are we to learn of them? Why do we need them?
Consider what the world would be like if there were no traffic rules at all. Would people be able to travel by automobiles, buses and other vehicles on the roadways if there were no traffic regulations? The answer should be obvious to all rational members of the human species. Without basic rules, no matter how much some would like to avoid them or break them, there would be chaos. The fact that some people break the rules is quite clearly and obviously not sufficient to do away with the rules. The rules are needed for transportation to take place.
Why are moral rules needed? For example, why do humans need rules about keeping promises, telling the truth and private property? This answer should be fairly obvious. Without such rules people would not be able to live amongst other humans. People could not make plans, could not leave their belongings behind them wherever they went. We would not know who to trust and what to expect from others. Civilized, social life would not be possible. So, the question is :
Why should humans care about being moral?
John Mackie calls ethical intuitions 'queer' and 'utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else'. '
Behind Mackie's distaste for intuition there no doubt lies some of the strong empiricist sentiment of twentieth-century philosophy. Empiricism--roughly, the idea that all 'informative' knowledge, or knowledge of the mind-independent, language-independent world, must derive from sense perception--has been fashionable for the last century, though less so, I think, in the past decade.
Here, I will give a counter-example to empiricism.
First example: Nothing can be both entirely red and entirely green. How do I know that? Note that the question is not how I came upon the concepts 'red' and 'green', nor how I came to understand this proposition. The question is why, having understood it, I am justified in affirming it, rather than denying it or withholding judgment. It seems to be justified intuitively, that is, simply because it seems obvious on reflection. How else might it be justified?
A naive empiricist might appeal to my experiences with colored objects: I have seen many colored objects, and none of them have ever been both red and green. One thing that makes this implausible as an explanation of how I know that nothing can be both red and green is the necessity of the judgment. Contrast the following two statements:
Nothing is both green and red.
Nothing is both green and a million miles long.
We have never observed a counter-example to either statement, so it would seem that the second is at least as well-supported by observation as the first. The second statement is probably true, since we have never observed a green object that is a million miles long, although there seems to be no reason why there couldn't be such a thing. We have a clear conception of what it would be like to observe such a thing, and it would not be senseless to look for one.But the first statement is different: we can see that there simply couldn't be a green object that is red, and it seems that no matter what our experience had been like, we would not have said that there was such an object; consequently, it would be senseless even to look for one.
I conclude with a final epistemological objection to intuitive morality. Even if moral properties are real, it does not seem that they could affect anything. They do not produce physical effects, so they do not affect our brain processes, so they probably do not affect our mental processes either.
Some philosophers maintain that knowledge of a thing requires some kind of interaction with it.
Now, this problem is not specific to moral knowledge. It is a general problem about a priori knowledge. Paul Benacerraf originally raised it as a problem about mathematics: since we have no interaction with the number 2--we do not bump into it on the street, and so on--how can we have knowledge of it?
Answer: Reason perceives universals
Universals exist necessarily. 'Universals' are abstract things (features, relationships, types) that two or more particular things or groups can have in common. For instance, yellow is a universal. It is something that lemons, the sun, and school buses, among other things, all have in common. Yellow is 'abstract' in the sense that it is not a particular object with a particular location; you will not bump into yellow, just sitting there by itself, on the street. Nevertheless, yellow certainly exists. Here is an argument for that:
1.
The following statement is true:
(Y) Yellow is a color.
2.
The truth of (Y) requires that yellow exist.
3.
Therefore, yellow exists.
Comment: Suppose I say, 'The King of Colorado is fluffy'. Since there is no king of Colorado, some would say the sentence is false; others would say it is neither true nor false. But no one thinks it would be true.
[The latter part of this essay is taken from Dr Michael Huemer.]]
Many students have a difficult time seeing a distinction between the following two statements:
a. It's true.
b. It's true for me.
But there IS a difference, and it is important to see the difference, and most people see the difference when it comes to things like mathematics, science, accounting, engineering, law, etc.
Here's the question: What does "for me" add to "It's true"? What I mean is, why would anyone say "It's true for me"? Let's say, for example, your favorite physics teacher asks you to tell her what the rate of fall is for a body located approximately at the surface of the Earth. Let's say that you are a student of physics and know with certainty, that bodies fall at 9.4 meters per second per second. If you write on your exam that bodies fall at 9.4 m/sec^2, your instructor would put an annoying red "X" next to your answer. (It should be 9.81)
"But wait a darn minute, there, ma'am: it's true for me that bodies fall at 9.4 m/sec^2!"
Relativism and Tolerance
What is the matter with the following claim:
"Different groups have different moral beliefs.
[One glance would show the absurdity of the logical extension of this argument. Disagreements in questions of history or biology or cosmology do not show that there are no facts about these subjects.]
Do you understand the reasons why such statements as "well it's true for them…" are confused and mistaken (with exceptions)?
Do you understand why such statements as "no one can tell me what to believe (or what to do)" doesn't work as a response to moral criticism? And why it isn't a very respectable or sophisticated response to differences in opinion? [Let's say a cashier in a supermarket who takes money from the cash register is approached by her boss. She defends herself: "No one can tell me what to do."
Let's say a private in the army does not know how to clean and reassemble a rifle.He is approached by his superior officer who tries to tell him how to do it. He answers: "No one can tell me what to think."]
Do you understand the reasons why such statements as "who needs morality?" are confused and mistaken (with exceptions)?
Do you understand the difference between the law and morality and why the law is an insufficient moral guide?
Do you understand how it is that humans get their views about morality? The various stages of development that many humans experience?
Morality is a social phenomenon. Think about this. If a person is alone on some deserted island would anything that person did be moral or immoral? That person may do things that increase or decrease the chance for survival or rescue but would those acts be moral or immoral? Most of what we are concerned with in Ethics is related to the situation in which humans are living with others. Humans are social animals. Society contributes to making humans what they are. For humans there arises the question of how are humans to behave toward one another. What are the rules to be? How are we to learn of them? Why do we need them?
Consider what the world would be like if there were no traffic rules at all. Would people be able to travel by automobiles, buses and other vehicles on the roadways if there were no traffic regulations? The answer should be obvious to all rational members of the human species. Without basic rules, no matter how much some would like to avoid them or break them, there would be chaos. The fact that some people break the rules is quite clearly and obviously not sufficient to do away with the rules. The rules are needed for transportation to take place.
Why are moral rules needed? For example, why do humans need rules about keeping promises, telling the truth and private property? This answer should be fairly obvious. Without such rules people would not be able to live amongst other humans. People could not make plans, could not leave their belongings behind them wherever they went. We would not know who to trust and what to expect from others. Civilized, social life would not be possible. So, the question is :
Why should humans care about being moral?
John Mackie calls ethical intuitions 'queer' and 'utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else'. '
Behind Mackie's distaste for intuition there no doubt lies some of the strong empiricist sentiment of twentieth-century philosophy. Empiricism--roughly, the idea that all 'informative' knowledge, or knowledge of the mind-independent, language-independent world, must derive from sense perception--has been fashionable for the last century, though less so, I think, in the past decade.
Here, I will give a counter-example to empiricism.
First example: Nothing can be both entirely red and entirely green. How do I know that? Note that the question is not how I came upon the concepts 'red' and 'green', nor how I came to understand this proposition. The question is why, having understood it, I am justified in affirming it, rather than denying it or withholding judgment. It seems to be justified intuitively, that is, simply because it seems obvious on reflection. How else might it be justified?
A naive empiricist might appeal to my experiences with colored objects: I have seen many colored objects, and none of them have ever been both red and green. One thing that makes this implausible as an explanation of how I know that nothing can be both red and green is the necessity of the judgment. Contrast the following two statements:
Nothing is both green and red.
Nothing is both green and a million miles long.
We have never observed a counter-example to either statement, so it would seem that the second is at least as well-supported by observation as the first. The second statement is probably true, since we have never observed a green object that is a million miles long, although there seems to be no reason why there couldn't be such a thing. We have a clear conception of what it would be like to observe such a thing, and it would not be senseless to look for one.But the first statement is different: we can see that there simply couldn't be a green object that is red, and it seems that no matter what our experience had been like, we would not have said that there was such an object; consequently, it would be senseless even to look for one.
I conclude with a final epistemological objection to intuitive morality. Even if moral properties are real, it does not seem that they could affect anything. They do not produce physical effects, so they do not affect our brain processes, so they probably do not affect our mental processes either.
Some philosophers maintain that knowledge of a thing requires some kind of interaction with it.
Now, this problem is not specific to moral knowledge. It is a general problem about a priori knowledge. Paul Benacerraf originally raised it as a problem about mathematics: since we have no interaction with the number 2--we do not bump into it on the street, and so on--how can we have knowledge of it?
Answer: Reason perceives universals
Universals exist necessarily. 'Universals' are abstract things (features, relationships, types) that two or more particular things or groups can have in common. For instance, yellow is a universal. It is something that lemons, the sun, and school buses, among other things, all have in common. Yellow is 'abstract' in the sense that it is not a particular object with a particular location; you will not bump into yellow, just sitting there by itself, on the street. Nevertheless, yellow certainly exists. Here is an argument for that:
1.
The following statement is true:
(Y) Yellow is a color.
2.
The truth of (Y) requires that yellow exist.
3.
Therefore, yellow exists.
Comment: Suppose I say, 'The King of Colorado is fluffy'. Since there is no king of Colorado, some would say the sentence is false; others would say it is neither true nor false. But no one thinks it would be true.
Some philosophers (the 'nominalists') say that the only thing multiple particulars have in common is that we apply the same word or idea to them. Here is an argument against that:
4.
|
Yellow is a color, and lemons have it.
|
5.
|
No word or idea is a color, nor do lemons 'have' words or ideas.
|
6.
|
Therefore, yellow is not a word or an idea.
|
Yellowness is something lemons, the sun, and so on have in common; so what they have in common is not (merely) a word or idea. Some philosophers will say I have oversimplified this issue. I say I have simplified but not oversimplified; the existence of universals is a trivial truth.
[The latter part of this essay is taken from Dr Michael Huemer.]]
