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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

#91

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

ducharmdev wrote: post #68
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.

It's odd to me that you chose color as an example of something objective, since so much about perception is subjective. Even if we think about it in more quantitative terms, with red being defined as having a dominant wavelength approximately 625–740 nanometres, it's a bit of an arbitrary definition isn't it? If we observe a wavelength of 624, objectively we might say it's not red, but someone may still observe it as…

Color relies on ostensive definition. It's a public part of language whether someone is color-blind or not. When we say "that car is red" we are, in a sense, pointing to something and then using the concept and rules of color in our language. We might see something as a particular color through perception, but when we see "that --->" we are, in a sense, "seeing" in language (including body language, for instance. You could ask me which one is red and I could simply point).

We, of course, might disagree, but color-blind people learn which traffic lights are red, green, or yellow, regardless of their perceptual faculties. Because the color is not just what you see, but what you say.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#92

Post by ajuc »

coldtea wrote: post #88
mcv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT does feel a bit like a refutation of his life's work. Because whether or not ChatGPT can think, it certainly has a good command of language without starting out with an inborn sense of grammar. It learns grammar by copying. Just like kids do, I suspect.

> without starting out with an inborn sense of grammar I'm not so sure though, because it starts by being fed sentences assembled by people. Sort of how we wouldn't say that a book itself has a "good command of language", but that the writer has one, and put it in the book. So you might need a seed with "an inborn sense of grammar" to create language first and a training corpus second, but once that's available in hu…

> Would an LLM gain a "good command of language" if it was just fed all the taling a human hears and the words it reads in its first 18 years of life?

Depends on what its starting weights are ;)

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#93

Post by calf »

miracle2k wrote: post #59
dhoe wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily r…

That's interesting, I'm a millenial aged leftist so I don't have the political baggage from the 70s-90s that older people have on Chomsky.

And so I find in a globalized, hegemonic world, Chomsky's first reason is just as important if not more so than the second: Seeing what the larger component is is crucial, as a prerequisite to doing something about it.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#94

Post by dotsam »

epups wrote: post #10

There almost certainly isn't a universal moral code. For every abominable act you can think of - murder, slavery, even genocide -, we can find examples of human groups that glorified them, usually by evoking religion, group affiliation or a mix of both.

If there is a universal moral code, we can never know it for certain. Moral knowledge, as well as all other kinds of knowledge, is always open to criticism and being proven wrong. But nevertheless we can make moral progress, just as we make scientific progress. We can find good explanations for why killing and enslaving people is wrong, even whilst we can point to countless examples where killing and enslaving people has been glorified. This is David Deutsch's principle of optimism: "All evils are due to a lack of knowledge".

Commitment to solving problems entails a commitment to knowledge growth, which in turn involves a commitment to certain values, such as valuing truth and being open to error-correction by debating and criticizing ideas. Killing and enslaving people is the opposite of this.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#95

Post by recursivedoubts »

"There are no valid absolute moral positions" is itself an absolute moral position. We don't need to appeal to language or darwinian survival characteristics or whatever to refute it, a reasonably educated 12 year old can understand why it can't be true.

Say what one will about "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", at least it is internally consistent.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#96

Post by hef19898 »

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 yet another person, who gained public "fame" for expertise in his initial field. And who then went on to believe that his newly gained recognition, and expertise in one field, qualifies him to reach out into other fields with public comments. And since the internet and society works the way they do, people assign him authority in those fields as well since he's famous. Hence, he became more popular science than hard science. At which point it is almost fair to just ignore him.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#97

Post by hotdogscout »

dgb23 wrote: post #80
snowpid wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its true. Straight outta wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Noam_Ch...

That's not what "genocide denial" means. This was perhaps wrong judgement in hindsight. Calling this or other things "genocide denial" and similarly extreme terms is a common tactic in order to craft an ad-hominem attack to divert from anti-imperialist criticism. I'm in part Bosnian, so American intervention has had a very real impact on my family's well being and even survival. So I'm at least ambivalent if not oppo…

So, based on your views, socialists are incapable of genocide? Since it could be an imperialist smear campaign?

Every instance of genocide denial I know of also follows this line of reasoning.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#98

Post by chomskyole »

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?…

> What Chomsky is saying is that if you include only the people who are "healthy" according to some subjective criteria and take a crossection of their moralities - the result isn't an empty set. Well duh.

Where do you get that statement from? I don't think he says that at all.

He says that the idea of morality is bound, i.e. it isn't infinite. I think that is easy to agree.

He also says that you can argue morals. So he doesn't argue for a cross section of morals at all, quite the opposite: he hints, in this short video, that you can analyse sets of morals for their consistency.

He uses the example of labour under slavery vs labour under a wage contract and how these different arrangements lead to different attitudes to labour. Implied is the idea that Chomsky is against slavery, but considers certain arguments slaveholders made valid.

Are you sure you aren't, accidentally, putting up a straw-man?

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#99

Post by dale_glass »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #85
dale_glass wrote: post #72

I disagree. Moral relativism is very much a thing. But it's just a muddled matter. To me, "moral relativism" just means the recognition that different societies had and have different moral ideas, and that even within a single society rules are murky and fluid, and often outright undefined. Pretty much any moral rule you can name has been proudly broken. Eg, torture? Take Abu Ghraib for instance. Not only was it done…

> To me, "moral relativism" just means the recognition that different societies had and have different moral ideas, and that even within a single society rules are murky and fluid, and often outright undefined. That’s just a sociological trick. You redefine X to mean “what people think X is” and come to “profound” conclusions. That’s like saying that the laws of the universe has changed when Einstein invented relativ…

> That’s just a sociological trick. You redefine X to mean “what people think X is” and come to “profound” conclusions. That’s like saying that the laws of the universe has changed when Einstein invented relativity.

That's exactly what you get under "objective" morality though. Everyone agrees "murder" is bad. Not everyone agrees on what "murder" means exactly. You don't have to try very hard to find people apparently just itching to kill a home invader in righteously retributive justice, or announcing the desire of going to the border to shoot trespassers.

> Moral relativism is, for example, when you think that being a slave owner in 1800 in the US wouldn’t be bad but being a slave owner in 2023 in the US is bad because of specific cultural background that is different then and now.

In a lot of circumstances, yes, that's indeed how the world truly works. Morality indeed can change over time, for instance using a lot of water on watering your lawn has very different moral scores depending on whether there's a drought going on or not. So it was perfectly moral 3 years ago and now it suddenly isn't.

Regarding slavery, you have to recognize that international deals involve quite a lot of interaction with countries where people have far less rights than we do -- and this is one of the underlying reasons why we buy stuff from them.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#100

Post by hotdogscout »

vehemenz wrote: post #74
hotdogscout wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it is absurd? I'd think a moral relativist could support science, reason, and grade school grammar while also believing it's due to cultural factors that are not inherently true.

> believing it's due to cultural factors that are not inherently true. Moral relativists are moral realists, meaning that they believe that moral truths are dependent, in part, on the culture in which the truths are being evaluated. So I don't think what you're talking about is moral relativism but rather, the fact that different cultures may have slightly different moral beliefs, which is obviously true. For actual…

You're right, I assumed moral relativism meant something else. Thanks.
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