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Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

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Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#41

Post by LindeBuzoGray »

jebarker wrote: post #2

I'm not sure I understand the point being made. Chomsky seems to be saying that since we learn the prevalent morality of our culture through sparse data there must be an underlying universal morality. But how does that allow for the fact that different cultures do have different moral codes and that those do change over time?

It can be seen in an individual. A boy is raised in rural Oaxaca, Mexico. He works on a farm, speaks Copala Triqui and no Spanish. Then when he's 14 his family moves to east Los Angeles.

As he adjusts to his new situation, his behavior changes. The moral code of rural Oaxaca is different them that of east LA. His moral code changes. Perhaps he always gave a great amount of help when needed to neighbors in rural Oaxaca, but stops doing that as much. This changes. In Oaxaca, he did not steal from his friends, nor does he in LA. This does not change.

It's obvious even in US culture. Two students go to Harvard, one goes into engineering, one diplomacy. What group are the moral traits of candor, frankness and directness valued? What group are the moral values of politeness and courteousness valued? Morality can be relative, depending on the situation. But for some situations it is not, the more universal things.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#42

Post by js8 »

ajuc wrote: post #7

I start to dislike Chomsky more and more. His work in linguistic is over my head, maybe it's true, I can't tell. But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Everybody sees faces in rocks because we have brains fine-tuned for seeing faces. Does it prove that there's something universal in looking like a face or even worse - being a face?…

The problem with ethics is that if you take almost any two different moral rules, there are always moral dilemmas where it is, for a large minority, unacceptable that we apply one rule over the other. So the moral rules of society as a whole form a logically inconsistent system, which appears to be only consistent within certain boundaries.

Since it is inconsistent system, every moral position can be logically invalidated. Therefore, the sensible positions, compromises, are also the least rationally defensible.

Now, Chomsky has a humanitarian angle, according to which no harm to other people is justifiable to make the world better. This means he rejects notion of justified war (which is anonymous killing of humans). And from this comes his position on Ukraine.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#43

Post by throw__away7391 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #11

I've read that Chomsky can be pretty nasty to his debate opponents, but he's amazingly congenial in this video. It really makes me wish I could spend hours and hours chatting with him. I've run across a handful of philosophers: Chomsky, Peter Kreeft, etc. who can stay really chill during a debate. It's seems like a superpower for keeping discussions productive.

He's very dismissive and disrespectful to anyone who isn't fawning over him. If you interview him and interlace praise and admiration for him, yes he's gonna be congenial.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#44

Post by twoodfin »

roenxi wrote: post #28
twoodfin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Chomsky is arguing is that, yes, in an important objective sense there is such a thing as “faciness” that our brains recognize. In the same way, I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red—even accepting that it’s the structure of our optical and neural systems that are the basis for this fact.

> I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red We don't. For starters there are colourblind people, for seconds there is no specific colour that can be called "red". There is a large and fuzzy category of red-ish colours like blood-red or rose-red. Even if there is some academic "these light wavelengths are the ones" definition of red that is arbitrary. Aliens might have drawn the lines elsewhere.

This is exactly Chomsky’s point. Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact.

To pick an example closer to the morality case: Hunger could equally be called a subjective phenomenon. Aliens may not experience anything like hunger. A rare genetic condition might produce a human who experiences escalating hunger as an escalating degree of pleasure.

But as humans making our way through the real world, we are forced by physical and anatomical reality to see the causes and consequences of human hunger as objective truths.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#45

Post by throw310822 »

jebarker wrote: post #2

I'm not sure I understand the point being made. Chomsky seems to be saying that since we learn the prevalent morality of our culture through sparse data there must be an underlying universal morality. But how does that allow for the fact that different cultures do have different moral codes and that those do change over time?

Seems very close to his argument about the innateness of language structures. I can rephrase your question replacing moral* with language:

> Chomsky seems to be saying that since we learn the prevalent language of our culture through sparse data there must be an underlying universal language structure. But how does that allow for the fact that different languages do have different grammars and that those do change over time?

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#46

Post by knewter »

roenxi wrote: post #28
twoodfin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Chomsky is arguing is that, yes, in an important objective sense there is such a thing as “faciness” that our brains recognize. In the same way, I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red—even accepting that it’s the structure of our optical and neural systems that are the basis for this fact.

> I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red We don't. For starters there are colourblind people, for seconds there is no specific colour that can be called "red". There is a large and fuzzy category of red-ish colours like blood-red or rose-red. Even if there is some academic "these light wavelengths are the ones" definition of red that is arbitrary. Aliens might have drawn the lines elsewhere.

We universally agree that it is at least "the wavelength produced from a well-calibrated display when asked to render #ff0000'

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#48

Post by [deleted] »

vehemenz wrote: post #9

Moral relativism is the most absurd form of moral realism, which is itself an absurd position. I'd be more interested in an explanation for why so many otherwise intelligent people, who are more than capable of reasoning for themselves and holding well-defended, sensible positions, find themselves attracted to moral realism, a truly mystical belief that offends science, reason, and grade school grammar.

[deleted]

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#49

Post by dhoe »

dgb23 wrote: post #27
maeln wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Chomsky was always like this. He is an unapologetic hypocrite, constantly criticizing the U.S and "the west" while defending "socialist" country for the exact thing, and often even worse, than he was criticizing the U.S for. Even going as far as denying the existence of genocide during the Yu…

You seem to mix things up? He has been very critical of "socialist" countries, especially towards their underlying political ideology.

Happy to learn otherwise, but everything I've seen follows the pattern of briefly paying lip service to the fact that some enemy of the US is not perfectly innocent, but well we're all human, and here's five pages on how the US is the worst.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#50

Post by cmrdporcupine »

ajuc wrote: post #7

I start to dislike Chomsky more and more. His work in linguistic is over my head, maybe it's true, I can't tell. But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Everybody sees faces in rocks because we have brains fine-tuned for seeing faces. Does it prove that there's something universal in looking like a face or even worse - being a face?…

Chomsky is a mixed bag, on multiple fronts. He's very strident, and especially many his recent takes on geopolitical issues are unable to understand the new polarities at work in the world. He's been an important critic of American foreign policy, but it has blinded him (and his followers) to the absolutely more terrible nature of e.g. Russian hegemony. (I actually think this turn began for him around the conflict in Serbia.)

But I find him a useful and important antidote to the dominance of total relativism postmodernism/poststructuralism on the "left" and respect him for doubling down on the important of reason, rationality, and an empirical method.

These days, especially in American academia, most people preposterously labelled (by conservative opponents) as "cultural Marxists" or "Marxists" generally are anything but. Marx and many other people in that vein in the 20th century were committed materialists -- attempting to ground their analysis in rather cold hard economic analysis -- you can debate whether they were right or not or using the right tools, etc but this was their philosophical position, what they were trying to do.

The bulk of today's apparently-left wing intellectuals are effectively idealists (in the epistemological sense, not the moral sense). They fundamentally believe in the primacy of ideas over the material world, but they've done a slight of and instead of referring to it as Forms ala Plato, or Idea as in Hegel, etc. it's now the "Narrative" etc. I think it is having a destructive effect, and has in large part discredited this line of though about the people it's supposed to be liberating. It's a middle class movement for middle class academics, and has little to offer the working class.

Chomsky is a refreshing antidote to this. I can't speak to his linguistic analysis, though.

He's also very very old at this point.

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