If the only reason to be moral is a subjective preference (to be moral), not rational or irrational, then is morality subjective in the sense of mind dependent (as with e.g. expressivism)?
I suspect the inverse holds.
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1First, you're misusing the term subjectivism. That refers to the theory that moral claims are truth-apt descriptions of attitudes, like 'I don't like murder' rather than expressions, which is what 'boo to stealing' is. What you're describing is more a form of expressivism/noncognitivism. Secondly, I don't understand why that relation is problematic? If moral claims are expressions of noncognitive attitudes, it would make a lot of sense for there to be no rationality involved in abiding by them.– edelexCommented Jun 2 at 14:39
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1You should abide by morals just as you would everything else that has an effect on your life. "Do what thou wilt" is sort of a blessing and a curse.– Scott RoweCommented Jun 2 at 17:18
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1Why should "do what thou wilt because thou wilt" be any more reasonable than "do what thou shouldst because thou shouldst"? Seems to me that what should be is to do what thou shouldst, in fact, even if what will be is that thou doest what thou wilt.– g sCommented Jun 2 at 18:01
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1@gs without having thought too much about it, what I will is something to do with me, I'm deciding. But 'should' sounds more like what someone else decided. How do they get to decide for me? Unless should and will are both up to me, and then there is no distinction. For me, 'should' is more like: everyone will benefit from some choice. So I should want to benefit everyone including myself, otherwise I'm stupid or irrational.– Scott RoweCommented Jun 2 at 18:58
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1I use the phrase "One Among Many" - perhaps it will work for you too.– Scott RoweCommented Jun 3 at 0:07
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2 Answers
But subjective preferences are often determined by reason. We are capable of choosing what we want, in order to get what we really, ultimately want.
You're hungry. So, you decide you want a hamburger. You created your preference for a hamburger in order to satisfy your preference for food in general, because you inferred that eating the hamburger would satisfy your current craving for food, and was readily enough available without too much expense.
Most of our preferences - in fact, nearly all of them - are instrumental, meaning that we formed these preferences in order to satisfy other, higher-level preferences. This is, or can be, a rational process.
We also may have two preferences that are on the same level but are in conflict with each other. Perhaps a person's church urges them to love their neighbor, while at the same time preaching hate for specific kinds of neighbors. Acknowledging these conflicts and revising one's preferences in order to eliminate them is a rational process.
What would we end up desiring, if we took this rational process to its logical end - if we completed selecting and ordering our preferences in order to eliminate inconsistencies between them, so that our true, deepest desires are best served? Our preferences at the end of such a process might be very different from the ones we hold at present. (And what exactly are our true, deepest desires? That's also something we would need to apply reason to discover.)
Perhaps, at the end of this process, we would have a certain position on murder. And perhaps any human who went through the same process of rational preference-optimizing would have the same position on murder!
What could be the reason for a difference? Suppose contrarily that two people end up with a different position on murder, after both having gone through the same complete process of rational reconciliation of preferences. Because they applied the same faculty of reason, the difference must have been in their initial preferences. But what causes a difference in initial preferences?
Culture causes such a difference. But differences in culture are not truly rational reasons to prefer something. "I want X because authority figures told me to want X when I was growing up" - that's not really sufficient reason to want X. Both people would be capable of realizing that, and therefore correcting for it, and eliminating any cultural differences in their preferences!
Genetic differences could cause a difference in initial preferences. Perhaps one person was born with true, deepest desires that are different from the deepest desires of the other person. In that case they might end up with final preferences significantly different from the first person. But does this actually happen very often among humans - or do almost all of us want the same thing, deep down?
If the two people did come to the same conclusions on murder at the end of their preference-reconciliation process, regardless of their culture or genes, then we might say those conclusions are both rational and (fairly) universal!
See also the Aumann Agreement Theorem.
I'd like to end by discussing an aspect of selfishness. Among a person's current preferences, the preferences that are selfish are designed to improve the life of their future self. The person's future self is a person who is not identical with their present self. Therefore, selfishness is actually a form of altruism or love towards a person who is different from you.
In certain thought experiments, it can be quite ambiguous which physical body is "your future self." Suppose you enter a teleporter that creates a perfect duplicate of you - and this teleporter neglects to kill your initial self, leaving two copies of you. If you are selfish, and you have a candy bar before you enter the teleporter (the candy bar not being duplicated with the rest of you), which of the two bodies should you arrange to receive that candy bar afterwards?
A pat answer is to say that the body that is not a copy should get the candy bar. But it is conceivable that the teleporter could operate in a ship-of-Theseus-like way, so that there is no coherent way to point to one of the resulting bodies and say, "this body is a copy, and that body is the original." The teleporter could, for instance, build half of each body out of cells from the original body, with the other half of each body made of new cells. It is even possible to imagine the teleporter doing this in such a way that the person's brain continues functioning throughout the process - as the brain gradually splits into two halves with the duplicated parts growing neuron-by-neuron in a process that kind of looks like cell mitosis.
So, given that the pat answer fails, who should you give the candy bar to? We are forced to look more closely at selfishness. What makes you you are certain attributes essential to yourself. So you realize that what you really want is to promote the welfare of beings who share those attributes. And this seems very close to altruism, depending on what you decide those essential attributes are. What if your child has some of those attributes? What if your neighbor has some of them?
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yeah i agree to an extent, but idt that's the case here. i thought moral claims were non-instrumental, and i would assume that is in practice also– user71399Commented Jun 2 at 16:26
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@andrós How do we arrive at moral preferences? For a particular moral preference, at one point we did not have the preference, then later, often in childhood, we heard or or read or experienced or thought about something, and then we acquired the moral preference, because we decided we wanted to, because acquiring the moral preference must have satisfied some other preference we had initially.– causative ♦Commented Jun 2 at 16:39
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idt it matters whether we introject or consciously decide on our values.– user71399Commented Jun 2 at 16:39
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It's a mistake to think of morality in individualistic terms. We don't just 'choose' to be moral because it tickles our fancies; we accept the constraints of morality because it's a social prophylactic that limits the spread of bad behavior through the community. An individual with no social contact has no need to be moral.
Of course morality is mind-dependent, but it's intersubjective, not merely subjective. And intersubjectivity takes on the character of Durkheim's social facts.
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Seems a bit pessimistic of human nature, that people wouldn't be moral if it wasn't for other people making them do it.– causative ♦Commented Jun 2 at 19:31
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2@causative: That's not what I said. I said that humans have no use or reason for morality without other people. The concept of morality is meaningless except in community. Without other people, the only value system possible is hedonism: maximize happiness and minimize discomfort. we only run into moral concerns when what's good for one person conflicts with what's good for another. Commented Jun 2 at 22:42
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@causative Or, when what is good for one person is good for basically everyone else too. This is vastly more important than the 'conflict' case. Let's be smart for a change! Commented Jun 3 at 0:03
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@TedWrigley The subject of morality is how to treat other people, as you say in your comment; of course, if there are no other people, there is little need for morality. But in your answer when you say it's "intersubjective" and we don't "choose" to be moral because it tickles our fancies, that's a second claim that goes beyond the subject of morality and towards the motivation for morality; i.e. that a person would not be moral simply because it appeals to their individual emotions. And that is pessimistic of human nature. A big reason people are moral is their individual emotions.– causative ♦Commented Jun 3 at 0:28
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1@Stef: That would depend. If they went V because they don't like meat or seafood, that's hedonism. If they went V because they don't want to harm living beings, that's an implicit social agreement they've made with other living beings whom they now view as imbued with some equal rights. Or if they went V because they think eating meat offends God, that's an implicit social agreement with an imputed God. I don't know if it's impossible, but t's really hard to invoke moral principles without simultaneously invoking social interactions. Commented Jun 3 at 15:31