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I'm having an ongoing discussion with some people, and I've run into a repeating issue that I don't seem to be able to understand on my own. They are making two main claims:

  1. "Inflicting avoidable harm on someone is an absolute, and it is bad. Suffering is harm. Causing suffering by taking advantage of someone who does not possess the knowledge or experience required to understand the ramifications of what is happening is bad." and
  2. "Analysis of material harm and oppression does not require a moral framework."

My lack of understanding thus far is in how the claims that suffering is bad and harm is bad and thus should be avoided are not moral claims. In my eyes, if something has been labeled not desireable or been labeled to be avoided, that must be a value judgement? In what ways could that labelling and those claims not be based on value judgements and a moral framework.

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    – Geoffrey Thomas ♦
    Commented Aug 13 at 14:12
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    By "moral framework" your interlocutors apparently mean systems of morality that vary, from culture to culture, say. Their claim is then that there is some objective core to morality that does not depend on such specific and relative systems, hence "absolute". This is a common position called moral realism:"Moral realists are those who think that... moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right."
    – Conifold
    Commented Aug 13 at 21:32
  • It revolves around the definition of "person" which is frequently other than "human being". Those wishing to bend others to their evil will usually start with propaganda to define the others as "subhumans", "heretics", "animals", or numerous other dehumanisations. Once this is accepted the others are outside the accepted moral framework. Societies can become warped like this for many generations with those brought up in the society rarely questioning the exclusion.
    – nigel222
    Commented Aug 14 at 10:29
  • moral frameworks don't typically decide if something is good or bad, but rather if a thing is better or worse than another thing.
    – njzk2
    Commented Aug 14 at 19:43

6 Answers 6

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I think this misses their point. It sounds a lot like what they are trying to argue for is that harm and suffering are human experiences that are near universally and negatively received by the individual.

Like this sounds like a counter to apologetics of systems of racism, apartheid, slavery, feudal caste systems, etc. Where people might argue that "within their social and moral frame of reference these people aren't doing anything wrong. That's just how they do it. And if you ask the people suffering from pain and oppression they might even tell you that this is how it's supposed to be and that they don't experience this as injustice or oppression".

So the point of that is to make it explicit, that pain and suffering are absolute human experiences of stress and unwellness of the individual no matter if as crime, torture, punishment, sacrifice or glorification ceremony, if someone were to boil you alive until you're dead, you'd rather sooner than later experience that as a very unpleasant emotion. Regardless of what the moral framework of the people around you or even your own moral framework would rank it as.

Now you can get overly technical and argue that, despite it being a near universal experience of unwellness and such a minimal requirement shared by so many different moral frameworks that it doesn't need the application of one particular framework,... it's obviously still a value judgement. You rank human well being and the lack of suffering as something desirable and good and the opposite as bad, so technically you could probably still call that a moral framework, but is that really what it's about?

Afterthoughts: Though in this generality it might also be tricky because of the fuzzy edges. Like for example sports is stress, pain and suffering is that necessarily bad? Is it ok if it is self-inflicted though? When is it actually self-inflicted and is it really self-inflicted if you do it to yourself because you want to (consciously or unconsciously) comply to social and moral norms and frameworks? Or questions of harm bearing and harm distribution, if harm cannot be avoided. Or people who push themselves through the pain because they want to accomplish something is that society conditioning the individual for self-exploitation or is that an intrinsic motivation and a form of self-expression and self-determination?

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  • You are arguing that justification based on “within their social and moral frame of reference these people aren't doing anything wrong” is wrong. And I am arguing that it is universal. In fact your own list: racism, apartheid, slavery, feudal caste systems, etc is a comprehensive list which covers much of the globe in 2024
    – Rushi
    Commented Aug 13 at 12:11
  • @Rushi That's a complete non-sequitor. Something being plentiful (universal is too strong of a claim) doesn't make it right. Often enough it doesn't even make it right within their own frame of reference since a lot of countries have updated those considerably in the last few hundred years. They might still regularly be hypocrites about it, but that doesn't make it less wrong, on the contrary. Also that list is far from comprehensive, you could add oppression and suppression based on gender, sex, sexual orientation, ... there's a whole lot of names for making people's live worse...
    – haxor789
    Commented Aug 13 at 12:34
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    @Rushi What does that have to do with my answer though?
    – haxor789
    Commented Aug 13 at 13:05
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    @haxor789 I think his argument is, "If the badness of suffering is recognizable because of its universality, why would not the goodness of the causes of suffering be recognizable because of their universality?" Now, it should be seen then that the concept of badness in the first half of the "equation" is not the same as would be juxtaposed with the concept of goodness in the second half, so that is why Rushi's argument veers off course, though, maybe.
    – Kristian Berry
    Commented Aug 13 at 15:33
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    @Rushi I am utterly baffled by your claim that "...Apologetics of systems of racism..." somehow means "suggesting the west currently is not racist." Where is this coming from? There's nothing in the answer that even remotely suggests such an outlandish nonsensical claim. I am completely unable to see any way that you could draw such an offensive conclusion about a stranger on the internet from those words.
    – barbecue
    Commented Aug 13 at 16:59
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My suspicion is that this is some form of materialism which might not have anything to say about ethics.

Let me propose this parallel analogous system to you:

  1. Putting diesel fuel into a motorcycle that's designed to burn unleaded gasoline is bad. It's bad for the engine. It damages the vehicle.

  2. The above statement does not require a moral framework.

That's hopefully not terribly controversial; you get the idea of what I'm driving at here and can provide any suitable example you might prefer.

Materialism suggests: a person and a motorcycle are fundamentally the same sort of thing. A person is a really complex machine made out of meat, but still nothing more that the purely-material components.

If you're looking for a scenario to discuss with your friends to understand their ideas further, I would suggest the following:

Someone has been in a terrible accident and requires a blood transfusion or they will surely die. However, the patient has very strong religious beliefs that receiving a blood transfusion is a grave sin and will condemn their soul to eternal Hell. They have left specific legal instructions for medical staff to let them die rather than administer a blood transfusion, and they're currently in a coma and cannot be consulted.

The questions for your friends, then, are:

  1. Is it bad to give them the blood transfusion and save their life? Is it bad to not give them the transfusion and let them die?

  2. Are those moral questions which require a moral framework?

I suspect that would be a fruitful line of discussion.

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    "Materialism suggests: a person and a motorcycle are fundamentally the same sort of thing" - No, it doesn't, or you're really stretching definitions here. People are conscious, they can experience suffering (and joy and everything else), and they can have entire lives worth of experiences. Motorcycles don't seem to be conscious nor capable of experiencing suffering or anything else. People and motorcycles consist of wildly different materials structured in wildly different ways. The most basic fundamental particles may be "the same stuff", but there are vast differences beyond that basic fact.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Aug 13 at 15:39
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    One could argue that even with the motorcycle example there's implicit moral systems involved. You could imagine a Top Gear or Mythbusters style program that did a "let's test how far this motorcycle can go on diesel" trial. The putting of diesel into a gasoline engine may be harmful to the engine, but it's not per se bad in an absolute sense, nor even is the resultant destruction of the motorcycle. (As it would have been purchased to be destroyed.) It's how you morally view the consequences which make it bad or not. -- I guess you're getting at that with the blood transfusion example.
    – R.M.
    Commented Aug 13 at 16:25
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    One could also say "putting a harmful man behind bars is bad. It prevents that man from committing harm. The harm-engine has been broken." Now we have that both inflicting harm is bad (by argument in OP's post), and preventing infliction of harm is bad (by this new argument). Either both are true at once universally, or both are true but only within their own (moral) frameworks.
    – Fax
    Commented Aug 13 at 18:11
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    As R.M. implied you're trying to conclude a prescriptive statement from a descriptive one and that doesn't work. Just because you see the bunch of particles in front of you as a diesel motor and consider it working if it runs without breaking, that is you prescribing a form and function to these atoms, while another person might prescribe a different form and function altogether to them. So good and bad only really work within that frame of reference. Though given that humans share a lot of properties, some things can still near universally be understood as bad by default/nature.
    – haxor789
    Commented Aug 14 at 10:44
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    nice example here !!
    – Fattie
    Commented Aug 14 at 11:48
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I agree with you. They may not have a (whole) moral framework - though I suspect they do - but they have, at least, a moral principle.

They might be taking a moral intuitionist stance https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism-ethics/ and say that we don't need to reason our way to this principle and so they don't have to reason their way to a framework. They just know. Hence, they might argue, there's no principle, it's just a gut knowing.

But I can't see how that is not a value judgment, especially if they articulate it as you did.

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    +1 @Vix Boudreau - we have to try to follow the distinction between some "moral intuition", maybe innate, maybe socially grown (also some animals shows "empathic traits") and judgments, that need a "system": values, arguments, etc.
    – Mauro ALLEGRANZA
    Commented Aug 13 at 11:14
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Taking the two points in reverse order:

  1. "Analysis of material harm and oppression does not require a moral framework."

I have no difficulty agreeing that recognizing material harm does not require a moral framework. "Oppression" is a trickier word, but I think I would accept that for the most part, recognizing oppression does not require a moral framework either.

However, I take this ...

  1. "Inflicting avoidable harm on someone is an absolute, and it is bad. Suffering is harm. Causing suffering by taking advantage of someone who does not possess the knowledge or experience required to understand the ramifications of what is happening is bad."

... to be primarily a moral judgement. The facts and analysis informing it are not moral in nature, but deciding what is right and what wrong, what is good and what bad on the basis of those facts is exactly the domain of morality.

My lack of understanding thus far is in how the claims that suffering is bad and harm is bad and thus should be avoided are not moral claims.

"Bad" can mean "harmful", which is not inherently a moral judgement. There will be differences among the details, but I'm sure we can all broadly agree about what is harmful to people and what isn't. However, if your friends want to take that approach, then they need to commit to it. That meaning of "bad" is purely analytical. It does not carry any kind of inherent imperative about how people should behave.

If that is the basis of your friends' claim then the conversation is not very interesting. Again, we can all broadly agree on what is harmful and what isn't. There's little controversy there. But your friends cannot then use that as a basis to say "doing bad is wrong" or "people should not do bad things". That is a moral judgement, and the moral "bad". I infer that that's where your friends are trying to go, which is why I (and I guess you) take (1) as a moral judgement.

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A possible way that those two claims might be made compatible is if they really mean that it doesn't require a complete moral framework.

Suppose you're attempting to develop a moral framework from scratch. You might do so by identifying specific moral claims where you're confident in the result that a reasonable theory of morals should yield: don't pump LSD into a pilot's oxygen mask, don't burn babies for fuel, etc. These obvious results provide a ground truth against which we can evaluate a candidate moral theory. If it agrees on all these cases, it's a sign that we might not be crazy to trust its predictions on the more morally ambiguous cases. This provides a mechanism by which we might move from an intuitionist approach to something more principled.

(That said, I suspect that Conifer is right and they're just taking a purely intuitionist stance. But if you want a way in which the claims could be consistent, this is a possible explanation.)

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Your friends are simply technocrats.

Your friends are, in a nutshell, trying to assert that there is a list of things (which your friends write) which are "absolute", that your friends' list is unarguable, decisive, platonic.

Obviously, that concept is total nonsense.

It's just a list they have come up with that they approve of, nothing more or less.

To counter their argument (or, let's put it this way, to show them how silly their position is), simply list obvious cases where it is by no means clear or "obvious" if harm is being done or not.

A simple example - in my current 21st century western-world life there is little chance of me being involved in a war or even a fist-fight. What is literally the worst harm that is done to me from day to day my whole adult lifetime? One group of humans steals about half of all my money every year - a tremendous harm. Your friends would babble "oh that doesn't count - it's not on our list." Another instant example is killing people via abortions, again they would babble "oh that doesn't count - it's not on our list." Another instant example is being arrested / imprisoned by other humans who happen to have on some "blue clothes" - and once again your friends would babble "oh that doesn't count - it's not on our list." Another instant and topical example in this historical era is a group of humans emitting pollution (greenhouse gases and so on) which indeed causes vast harm to other humans, and again your friends would babble "oh that doesn't count - it's not on our list."

Via examples like this, you can decisively show them that they do not have some sort of indisputable mathematical list, it's just ... a list they made up. (Of course they'll just ignore you ... and, hand you their list again, stating that the list is the list.)

Each case listed is highly and hotly debatable; the notion that there is an "absolute" answer is absurdist.

In a word your friends are technocrats politically - folks who think they "know best and absolutely", who think they are experts and that experts should "rule the world" as it were; note they are literally stating "x doesn't need to be debated because, we've given you the list, experts (like us) decide the list and there is no debate".

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  • The technocratic principle is not that some people get to make arbitrary decisions, but that there are differences in knowledge that make different people's opinions clearly far better or worse than others. A recent demonstration of the technocratic principle being valid was when pressure vessel design experts told the submersible company that composite hulls suffer from cyclic fatigue cracking, such that they might be safe for several undersea trips, but will then collapse at some point due to cumulative damage. The submersible designer rejected the technocratic principle.
    – Dcleve
    Commented Aug 14 at 17:58
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    "The technocratic principle is not that some people get to make arbitrary decisions, but that there are differences in knowledge that make different people's opinions clearly far better or worse than others" HEH ! precisely the technocrat's view, so funny
    – Fattie
    Commented Aug 14 at 18:00
  • In establishing vehicle safety design criteria, the US adopts the technocratic principle, and enforces the ASME pressure vessel design guidelines. In establishing medical safety, the US implements the technocratic AMA recommendations. In building code structural design, architectural and civil engineering standards are likewise implemented
    – Dcleve
    Commented Aug 14 at 18:01
  • (Hence the nightmare of US health crisis.) Sigh, this has now become politics. Fortunately, the nightmare of the "technocratic decades" over in the USA is done, with the recent critical supreme court ruling washing away that era. But all of this political, and views differ. In this wholly correct answer, I explain that the "friends group" are behaving in a manner analogous to the political term of derision, technocrats. Put very briefly they're stating that there's some special list of facts - that they know best; this is covered up with terms like "clearly" "absolute" etc.
    – Fattie
    Commented Aug 14 at 18:07
  • The OP provides no justification that his/her friends are technocrats, or have uniquely better judgement or expertise on moral questions than others do. There is no reason to think that the technocratic principle is being invoked, or is applicable in the OP. Your assertion of the "technocratic principle" applying, without any justification, per your own reasoning, would also be a case of the "technocratic principle". But this appears to be untrue, and a different sort of behavior -- fallacious unsupported claim. But citing a fallacy web site -- you would reject as technocratic!
    – Dcleve
    Commented Aug 14 at 18:09

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