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Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

openculture.com

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Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#311

Post by dotsam »

tivert wrote: post #281
dotsam wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you mean by "problems"? In David Deutsch's terminology, a problem exists when a conflict between ideas is experienced. It is worth reading his books to understand more on his view. He builds on Karl Popper's work, which is also worth reading. > And whose problems? Everyone has their own particular problem situation. Here's some relevant things Popper has said about problems and solving them: > All things li…

>>> Can we agree that solving problems = good? If you grant that, the rest should follow. >> My solution might be the source of your problem, and why should I care if it is? > How to 'make you care' about you creating a problem for me is itself a problem that we can create knowledge to solve, perhaps e.g. by creating a legal system that discourages you from doing the thing that made my life worse. I think your use of…

I put ‘we’ because institutions like legal systems are fundamentally collaborative, unless enacted by a total dictator.

Popper’s grandparents were Jewish and he wrote one of his major works which explores these topics, The Open Society and Its Enemies, as an urgent response to the totalitarian ideologies and atrocities of WWII. Totalitarian ideologies do not permit open, critical pursuit of the truth, and so they cannot create knowledge to solve problems in an unbounded way. Free, open societies can, where ideas can be freely exchanged and people have the freedom to criticise institutions without fear of violence. The values of an open society are the values needed for knowledge growth. And the reason we want more knowledge is to solve our problems.

I am wondering if it would have been better if I had written ‘solving problems is on balance a good thing’? Or do you think solving problems is on balance bad, or perhaps neutral?

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#312

Post by pixl97 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #230
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s that radical in a sense but trying to argue it is. When you think about it though, we kind of know that e.g. the founders of the U.S. had some sort of guilty conscience going on with regards to slavery. So we have folks like Washington freeing the slaves in his will, which of course his wife walked back on, and he probably had an idea that she might do that too. And yet people are able to jump thro…

> we kind of know that e.g. the founders of the U.S. had some sort of guilty conscience going on with regards to slavery From where did that secret sense of guilt come? Maybe there was no sense of guilt at all and it was all performative, cynically done for the sake of his reputation. But perhaps the arguments from contemporary abolitionists were secretly eating away at him from the inside, inspiring a real sense of…

Heh, yea, trying to use the internal feeling of guilt as a basis is a path to complete failure in my eyes.

This overlaps with the quest for AI we have and Chinese Room arguments. We can't even argue that people have the same sense of guilt. Is guilt in some people performative for social gains? Do other people feel guilty on things that at least to me make no sense?

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#313

Post by attentive »

Varqu wrote: post #265

I find it troublesome to listen to the person who claims that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in their wars [ https://civilek.info/en/2023/04/30/noam-chomsky-russia-fight... ]

This is only one of the outrages claims he made with regards to russia's war in Ukraine. He no longer has any credibility as far as I am concerned.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#314

Post by wubrr »

bambax wrote: post #306
simonh wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s not saying we have instinctual ethical views. He’s saying we have a biologically determined interpretive framework we use to evaluate ethical questions. This is what he was talking about when he said we make a leap from scattered data to specific conclusions, and we all do this in a similar way. We all just have different data. However when we have very similar data, such as living in a particular culture, we mo…

> when we have very similar data, such as living in a particular culture, we mostly come to the same conclusions That's not my take from the interview, but in any case this is provably false. People living in a given "culture" don't come to the same conclusions: they come to different conclusions -- usually opposite ones. Politics wouldn't exist otherwise. Or most wars, which are almost always between neighbors shari…

I mean if you recursively generate 'opposite' conclusions you still only end up with 2 different conclusions?

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#315

Post by pixl97 »

LindeBuzoGray wrote: post #110
jebarker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's obvious that those traits, e.g. not stealing, are universal or part of some fundamental moral grammar. It just means they're common and widespread.

Not stealing, but as I said, stealing from one's friends. Most cultures frown on that.

Take the idea of a post-singularity culture. To an individual in this society (if the idea of individualism still existed) have a moral framework anywhere near ours?

What is stealing if I can push a button and said object can be easily duplicated?

Does pain exist if I can turn if off an the level of my brain? Is death horrible if I can reconstitute myself from a backup?

The idea of a universal set of morals, and that humanity could even come close to finding them at our point in development is just not something I believe in happening. We are enslaved to our emotions and bound to our physical meat.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#316

Post by firecall »

scoofy wrote: post #201

I think that the thing that most people don't realize about ethics is the meta-ethical problem that axioms are by definition arbitrary. When we really think about the fact that all of our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms, suddenly the teeth to ethics have a deep, serious problem. The only argument we have at that point is that the axioms "feel" correct, and I have no problem with this basis, I consider…

For further reading, see Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#317

Post by pixl97 »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #294
JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mankind, from civilization to civilization, has largely kept the same set of basic morality regardless of where they are or what religion they possess > murder ... pretty universally seen as wrong I have no idea how you could be even passingly familiar with societies like the Mongols or Aztecs and believe this to be true.

Religions require people to do stupid and harmful things all the time. They are extant to proper morality. People weren't just wandering around those societies and murdering other people in the same group without justification or punishment.

It's interestingly how you silently show that 'group' classification of humans allows any person to do any action they want to another person as long as they can find a means of putting them in a particular group.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#318

Post by lucideer »

> He draws a natural comparison between this process and that of language acquisition, which also depends on “having a rich built-in array of constraints that allow the leap from scattered data to whatever it is that you acquire. That’s virtually logic.” And so, “even if you’re the most extreme cultural relativist, you are presupposing universal moral values. Those can be discovered.”

I'm not saying Chomsky's conclusions are wrong, but I don't see any evidence for them in this article. It seems predicated on the above: drawing a "natural" comparison between acquiring language and acquiring moral values, but there's no basis stated for that comparison. What's "natural" about it? They may be similar processes but how are we assuming that out of hand?

Chomsky is a linguist & honestly this seems like a protection of realities within his own primary field of knowledge, onto separate fields, with scant justification of the similarities.

Again, the fields - and processes - may well be comparable, but nowhere does this seem to be interrogated.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#319

Post by lisper »

afwef wrote: post #290
lisper wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But cultural norms -- indeed, culture itself -- is grounded in evolution. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

Only partly, there is still a large degree of arbitrariness based on the social environment within the biologically constrained bounds

Sure, all behavior exhibits variation within evolutionary constraints. But it is still not the case that "all of our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms". That is no more true than that the weather is "based on arbitrary axioms".

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#320

Post by pixl97 »

fluoridation wrote: post #203
nico wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he only truths I can imagine that could meet those requirements would have to be really abstract, like 1+1=2 And that is not even universally or absolutely true, 1+1=2 is a set of symbols that need to be interpreted by someone for them to have meaning, it’s a concept made up by people Hence, 1+1=2 is just as relative as anything else we express through language

"1+1=2" as a string of symbols is open to interpretation, however, both you and I understand the idea that that string of symbols is conveying, and that idea is true objectively.

>both you and I understand the idea that that string of symbols is conveying

Until the moment we have to take each other to court, then suddenly two different trials with two different juries comes out with conflicting answers.

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