a reductionist would not disagree with anything you said. the fact that you had to revert to explaining the workings of "society" through interactions by INDIVIDUALS only furthers the reductionists argument. there is nothing that cannot be wholly explained through the interactions of individuals and you cant explain anything without reverting to individuals acting. society, therefore is a completely useless concept. it only serves to simplify.
Well said as always, but I had no idea that people would debate this question. "Molecules never accomplish anything; atoms accomplish things!" Uh-huh. ;-)
Let me throw in another thought here. I don't know much about philosophy so I don't think it would be responsible to commit to a technical term like intersubjectivity, but I think it's reasonable to liken the dignification of moral principles to the dignification of fiat currency. That seems like a proper analogy to me. But it looks like you're taking this, in which society defines what morality itself is, and saying therefore it also decides what specific things are moral.
However, society is ultimately subject to its own definition of morality, regardless of whether that definition is reached intersubjectively or not. I don't think Bitbutter is arguing from his own personal indignation, he's saying taxation is inconsistent with society's own intersubjective understanding of morality.
To draw another economic analogy, the US dollar is globally valued intersubjectively at a certain level of purchasing power, but if that valuation (as expressed in exchange rates) is out of alignment with the valuation of competing currencies, you'll have a currency crisis, because the current valuation is internally inconsistent.
Hey Randy, I'm glad you went back to the chalk board format, not that I don't like seeing ya, but this sentence is already a run-on so I'm gonna stop now.
Excellent video. I agree that morality comes from inter-subjective consensus, but this clarified my argument for it. It's not majority rule as some label it, but a compromise reached among societies members.
Like the ones listed here, just about everything we consider a moral question I think deals with deciding between unfavorable options - At least those moral problems we consider "hard". Those are the ones which really put ethical theories to the test. An ethical theory like strict utilitarianism looks great on the drawing board, until you run such a problem through it and get an absurd outcome.
Ok -- I think I see what you're getting at, but does it occur to you that the people who set the price (me and you) did so purely voluntarily?
unless I'm mistaken, in this circumstance no one is forced to buy or sell at a price they didn't agree on. How do you get from intersubjective agreement to acts of "moral" violence?
Secondly - I would like to point out that, yes, other peoples actions played a part in making the decision -- but it was a person who made it. not a conglomerate of people.
Hi VeritasEtLibertas82, in a majority rule moral code system, the people making the laws also do so purely voluntarily. I mean, yeah, if I think my stock is worth $200,000, nobody can force me to go to the marketplace and sell it for $100,000. If I don't like the price, I can leave the marketplace. But if you don't like the laws of society, you can leave society too, there are still lawless places on earth.
Nobody is denying that if you want to stay in society, society will enforce its rules with force. Where we disagree, if we even do, is whether or not it is moral to initiate force or not, correct? Well, how do we answer moral questions? Different people have different answers. You might not like my answer, but it is a concrete proposal which has its advantages. What is your answer? Reasonable people should be able to give their reasons--what's your reason why initiation of force is wrong?
Yes 1noen1, it does seem to me that libertarianism requires a belief in objective morals. The Objectivists make much truck of this, of course :-) It boggles my mind how anybody could both (A) believe in the cultural relativity of morals, and (B) belief in the absolute immorality of taxation. But, as you say, hilarity ensues.
Also, I don't really feel the force of your statement about the conglomerate of people. It is well acknowledged that competition plays a vital role in the marketplace, and competition is the conglomerate of other people who you could have made the deal with, but didn't.
In your thought experiment each person involved made a decision, one consideration in that process was accounting for the decisions made by other people. At no point did an autonomous sentient being called society come into existence and make a decision. individual people made each discrete decision resulting in a kind of "average".
If this is actually what you mean when you say "society decides" then we don't disagree.
Randy, this admission is more important than the content of the video. You are not being altogether intellectually honest in your presentation. If this is your belief then you need to back it up, or we just have blatant propaganda dressed up as philosophical discourse on markets.
Hi smotviddy, I always discuss things in goodfaith and with goodwill. Life is too short to waist on bullshit. I have to admit, I don't know what you are objecting too here tho---what exactly do you think I did wrong?
Your "explanation" of intersubjectivity is merely a statement of belief - with an appeal to consensus - both to an abstract market "decision", and to a consensus opinion from the viewers of this video! If that's your morality then you are bankrupt.
Ha, well, out of courtesy, I'll tell you I'm not going to spend any more time thinking about it. This vid already has over 100 comments on it from very smart people who are considerate enough to make themselves understood, and I don't have time enough to respond to all of them.
Kudos, you have taken an argument that in its complexity could exhaust many hours of studious rebutting, and framed it in a manner that leaves little doubt as to its accuracy as a postulate of clarified conciseness.
I dont know all that many anarchists who claim society doest exist while also explaining things away with the invisible hand. If your not straw manning, your at least cherry picking. There is no such thing as objective value, all value is subjective, and this is a basic understanding of many anarchist (at least the austrian ones). Your talking about reverse valuations, if we make an exchange where each values what their getting more than their giving, both parties profit, I'm glad you get it
I dont know how you can say paper money arises from an intersubjective consensus. Are you not familiar with the history of paper money? Historically paper money has been decreed by the state which often threatens the death penalty who does not use the paper. In america, paper started not a money, but as a money substitute redeemable in gold. The state then confiscated all the gold they could and then enacted penalties for anyone who did not accept the paper, a process you call consensus
Just to play devil's advocate here a little, how does this explain things like market crashes? I'm probably still misunderstanding, but it seems like the whole point there is that the market can misvalue things even intersubjectively.
AWESOME question. Somebody who really believes in the free market would probably say something like the market never MISvalues something. But rather, the value of something can change very rapidly. If on thursday BRK.A is worth $100,000 a share, and on black friday, BRK.A is worth $1 a share, the true believer wouldn't say that the market was wrong on thursday--rather they would say that the market was right on both thursday and friday, its just the value changed rapidly.
I suppose one could look at it that way, but it's not like these rapid changes just come out of the ether, there are reasons for it. Maybe BRK.A's P/E ratio was unsustainably high, something like that. Did you expect that the housing bubble would last forever? If not, why not?
Yeah I'm going to think about these questions for a long time ianw115. Because in point of fact anybody who isn't a true believer in the market does say that the market misprices things, or that societies have made mistakes in their law codes,etc. The analogy of "bad law as market crash" is,I think, a very fruitful way of investigating such concerns.
I don't see how we have to disagree in order to make social rules. I do understand that it is required in the stock market because in the stock market we are betting against each other. In the stock market you profit from the other person being less knowledgeable than you. But I don't see how that applies to social rules.
Hi FatGermanBastard, I suppose I should clarify and say that I'm talking about rules which tell us what to do when we disagree about something. Suppose a teacher has sex with a student. Presumably they think that's ok, but presumably the parents of the student don't. The rules about age of consent are there to tell us what to do when these sorts of disagreements happen. If nobody ever disagreed about who had sex when with whom, we wouldn't need any moral laws about sex.
Outstanding vid, as always. Your discussion about the market and intersubjective agreement is dead on.
I think the part where you started discussing morality wasn't as strong. It seemed that you tried to force an parallel where there isn't one. Your view that "disagreement is the engine of intersubjective agreement" was very convincingly established with your market example, but I think you pressed when you tried to apply it with moral examples.
1) You say you're discussing morality, but it actually seems to be more about law. They're different. It's easy to find examples of laws, even in a legitimate democracy, that are immoral (Ex: Jim Crow laws).
2) Morality is only a concern because we're sometimes tempted to violate it. The relevance here being, the teacher and student might agree that their behavior is wrong.
When I take your "disagreement is the engine of intersubjective agreement", and apply it to the prohibition against murder (both moral and legal), I don't think it works. Excluding some criminals and lunatics, the prohibition against murder seems to be universally accepted. That degree of agreement makes it more firmly ensconced. That's the opposite relationship as with your market example, where everyone agreeing on a stock valuation basically shut that market down.
Hi V.E.P.Z, sure, I ran out of time at the endof the vid to elaborate; I hope to make a better video to explain further. (1) yes, there is a distinction between laws and morality. we do say that laws can be wrong. But if a law is wrong, what makes it wrong? My answer is the law runs counter to intersubjective consensus (victims of jim crow will agree they haven't been consensed :-) I realize this answer has its drawbacks, but what else could make a law morally wrong?
(cont, to V.E.P.Z) (2) yes, morality is only a concern when we're tempted to violate it. I.E. if nobody ever murdered, the business of making laws about murder and enforcing them would be shut down, the same way that the business of selling BRK.A would be shut down if everybody valued it the same. Doesn't mean people wouldn't give value to it--its just there would be no marketplace for it.
I'd say that a law is wrong for the same reason that an action is wrong - by weighing the justification for it, and range of consequences of it, in light of upholding the value of every individual life lived. In the case of laws, the consequences include the value of the entire social structure, which makes things much hairier. Barring obvious moral violations (like Jim Crow laws), I think the question of morality of laws hinges mainly on the legitimacy of the system by which the laws were made.
For morality, one paragraph comments aren't enough space for anyone :) But I disagree that society determines morality. (Other than as trivially linguistic - moral language is determined by social conventions, though that doesn't touch the reasons for moral claims.) Society is also a major context by which consequences are evaluated. I'd say that a just society is the most important intermediate moral value, as it most fully enhances the primary values of morality's concern.
@Brascofarian, this analogy works on the assumption of stock trading, where the aim is to make material gain. Assuming that items x and y are valued at exactly equal worth: if you want to gain, why would you trade something that is worth $100,000 for $100,000 dollars? You've lost $100,000, and gained $100,000. In that case you might as well hold on to your stock; any trade would be literally worthless for everyone.
Not really... I would argue that if they are looking for a profit then they value their holding at +$100,000. Then there are other issues such as liquidity and opportunity cost... like I say, it's too simplified.
I don't think this gets away from simple supply and demand mechanisms that are not affected by anarchism in principle.
I'd say that the state (in the very general sense of its basic legitimacy) is a particular intersubjective consensus, and there simply is no such thing as "*the* intersubjective consensus". In other words, unless one ultimately arbits in one direction or another between multiple intersubjective consensuses by appealing to something outside of it (or simply majoritarianism), you're left with a stalemate in which the pro and anti state positions have no more claim to "truth" over the other.
Ok what I mean was that state solutions are not inter-subjective. Of course the state itself is an inter-subjective consensus - and this is the only thing that allows it to exist.
There is no real way to determine 100% absolute facts. At the moment the scientific method is usually considered the best way to convince people of whether something is true or not, but even this is decided intersubjectivly.
They're not intersubjective relative to those who don't agree with them already, but this makes the state no *less* intersubjective than any proposition you make that others don't already agree with. This is the trap that intersubjectivity lays for the anti-statist.
I didn't say anything about absolute certainty, only "truth" in general. As far as science goes, I'd insist that it doesn't represent the only area of knowledge that contains "truth" and "meaning".
*chuckle* I'm not trying to lay any trap for the statist, but you are right, I'm just trying to point out that cooperation happens all the time even when people don't agree. Going back to the marketplace analogy. I might think a stock I own is worth more than the marketplace says it does. In fact, if I didn't, I wouldn't own the stock. Nevertheless, if I want to, say, use the stock as collateral for a loan or something, its the market price, and not my personal price, which counts.
Randy, I'm not accusing you of laying a trap, although my language could have been more clear. I'm actually saying that the anti-statist lays a trap for themselves when the relativistic implications of an intersubjectivist account is brought to light and they themselves want to work within that framework. I view the state vs. anti-state argument as a functional stalemate in that framework.
Hi sharperguy, the market chooses a price for a stock which might not be the price I want the stock to be at. Similarly, society might make a law which other people agree with, but you don't. How come you think everybody should pay the market price, but you don't think everybody should follow the law? They were both set in the same way.
This the fundamental fallacy that lies at the heart of democracy.
Let me answer with a question. Do you think that an optimal solution would be reached if all parties had to vote on what the price be, and then be disallowed from paying/charging any other price?
Hi sharperguy, but that's exactly what happens with stock prices. It doesn't matter if I think BRK.A is worth $200,000 a share---if I go to a banker to get a loan, using my stock as a collateral, he has to treat it as if it were worth $100,000 a share--the market price. If he didn't, he would be stealing from his depositors. And yes, I think there should be laws against stealing.
Person A having less 'paper money' than person B makes him objectively more influential in the world, so your categorization of value being a purely subjective attribute is a bit problematic, isn't it?
Only because those people subjectivley view that money as legitimately valuable.
That's like saying the word blue can objectively be associated with a certain wavelength of light because if you say something is blue, most people will come to the same conclusion about what that means - even though the use of the word blue or red to refer to that colour is an arbitrary, inter-subjective decision.
@sharperguy It doesn't matter why, the fact is that the value here called 'subjective' has an objective effect, thereby making the whole distinction useless in this case in my opinion. It doesn't really matter why value 'has this power' since I was problematizing the categorization, not the cause.
Hi the Mariborchan, I don't think value is a purely subjective attribute--I think its an intersubjective attribute. The reason wealthier people have more influence is that everybody agrees to give them more influence. When they stop doing so (e.g. when runaway inflation causes a currency to collapse) their influance evaporates.
Not to disrupt your interactions with others, but what people are fundamentally disagreeing with is precisely this claim that everyone agrees. It seems like you're saying that whatever happens to be the case, everybody agrees or consents to it. But, to me, it makes no sense to say "everybody agrees", in your example, relative to, say, a socialist. Not only do they ideologically disagree, but I have trouble seeing how they could be said to "consent" to circumstances largely beyond their control.
I think, at best, you can make the case that most people asqueisce to the circumstances. But I don't think you can maintain the claim that everyone agrees, let alone consents, to a situation that they ideologically disagree with and that involves social dynamics in which they do not have decision-making power relative to others. I think that pre-existing power structures and disparities in decision-making power preclude the possibility of explicit consent.
About the society and market thing: I actually agree insofar as libertarians sometimes sound like social atomists. But I think the spirit of the claim is more like this: don't anthropomorphisize "society" (or markets for that matter). So, I wouldn't claim "societies don't exist". What I would claim is that "societies don't act as a single entity and there are problems that arise when the term is used too generally in a way that obscures diversity or internal conflict". It's a language issue.
When someone says "society decided that ...." as a defense of something, and there clearly are dissenters to the thing in question, libertarians resist this because the statement seems to obscure the clear fact that there are plenty of people that never explicitly had anything to do with deciding on the thing in question, and yet are effected by it. So that it ends up seeming like a gigantic appeal to the majority (or even something obscuring something much more heirarchical).
One thing that makes anarchists cringe is when people claim that "country X is at war with country Y" when really it is the governments of those countries which have declared war.
I think the fundamental point is that you can't actually claim "X is moral" (and, by extension, defend the state ethically) by appealing to intersubjective consensus. IC is at best just "descriptive ethics", as in "this is just what people do or think". But it has absolutely no sway in terms of an argument trying to say "this is what is actually right or wrong".
Honestly, I don't think it's necessary for me to answer that in order to maintain an opposition to the intersubjectivist arguments. All that is sufficient for me to do that is to point out that intersubjectivity cannot derive an ought from an is (or, epistemologically speaking, justify a truth claim in general) with any more authority than other ethical theories. If we don't think "truth" claims can be justified by mere agreement or popularity, intersubjectivity isn't going to sway us.
I mean, this is kind of like Marx saying "the free market can't determine what something is worth. All it does is determine what people think its worth."
I see the analogy. However, subjective theories of value in economics are generally not meant to apply to ethical value (although some libertarians actually do make such conclusions about ethics from it - I think they're confusing fields or misapplying the methodology). In fact, Mises went out of his way to say that austrian economics cannot judge people's ends or values themselves, and he insisted on a methodological dualism demarkating the boundary of economics.
Hi Brainpolice2, I can understand if you say (a) we SHOULD pay the market price for good but (b) we SHOULD NOT necessarily follow intersubjectively negotiated moral laws. But I'm interested in why. I mean, I know you have a better reason than just "I disagree" or "I have a book which says you are wrong". Is it that you have an alternate account of where these morals come from? Or something else? Just curious.
Well, to be clear, I wouldn't even necessarily say "we should pay the market price for a good" (and I think that there are various factors contributing to prices in actually-existing economies that warp that price from what could really be said to be "the market price"). I'm saying that economics, in the way the Austrians like Mises methodologically set it up, can only describe the market process. So I'm really trying to distinguish the descriptive from the prescriptive.
Hi brainpolice2, let me clarify; for example, somebody who believes in a minimum wage denies that we should pay market rates for wages. Are you denying that we should pay market prices in this sense? If you think that minimum wage laws are morally wrong, then you do think the market has moral suasion. It isn't a case of going from the descriptive to the prescriptive: this is a case of how we invent a new prescriptive law. Its not inference, its invention.
From a left-libertarian free market perspective, actual free market prices would likely be comparatively benevolent. So, first off, I'm distinguishing "free market prices" from "market prices in current mixed economies". So, from my POV, we're being shifed in current markets. But beyond this, I'm trying to sharply distinguish economics from ethical philosophy. Economics can't explicitly tell us what we should or shouldn't do, although perhaps it can inform an ethical theory.
Hi Brainpolice2, I can go with that. By the same token, an intersubjectivist would say that in a free marketplace of ideas, where nobody is coerced into voting one way or another, the intersubjectively arrived at moral laws are likely to be comparatively benevolent, and thus can inform ethical theory. Does that have a plausible ring to you?
I guess the big thing we're running into is that while you're describing things as intersubjectively arrivated at, I'm not seeing it as a consistently consensual process. I'm seeing it, on the positive end, as involving an alienation of many individuals from a meaningful participation, and on the negative end, as being imposed on many individuals without them having a meaningful choice to not be subject to it. If "liberty" is viewed as something meta-normative, "liberty" seems lacking here.
Hi brainpolice2, is it really any more or less liberty than setting the stock prices, tho? I mean, suppose I think that BRK.A is worth $200,000, but the market price is only $100,000. Is it a violation of my liberty that I cannot choose to sell it at $200,000? There are a lot of people who feel alienated from society because they do not have enough money to buy health insurance for their kids. Just because I feel like I'm not at liberty doesn't mean I'm not, what's the difference?
I'm thinking of liberty not in the specific terms you present here, but in terms of having a choice or not period. So I don't think of it as quantative decision between two different things, but the space to make a decision for yourself in the first place ("positive liberty"), as well as the space to not necessarily be subject to the decisions of others ("negative liberty"). In positive liberty terms, the state is non-participatory. In negative liberty terms, it's non-opt-outable.
I think of it more as analogous to whether I can invest or not in the first place. If I had no choice but to invest, it'd be a negative liberty infringement. If I had no choice to invest, it'd be a positive liberty infringement. But, to continue the analogy, I don't see the situation as being one in which everyone is meaningfully empowered or included to participate on one hand and meaningfully be given the space to not be subject to the system on the other hand. Circumstances are oligarchal.
Hi brainpolice2, ok, well, if I don't have $100,000, I cannnot invest in the first place. Have I been denied positive liberty? If I do not have $800 a month, I cannot buy health insurance. Have I been denied positive liberty? There is a marketplace for healthcare plans, if none of them are affordable to him, has he been denied liberty? There are also a marketplace of societies available, have you been deined positive liberty if you don't like the choices available to you?
I'm speaking of positively liberty as the empowerment to participate at all. I don't think of it as the same thing having necessities like enough money to afford something, but simple decision-making if one being effected by a given organization. The socialist anarchists usually call this "decision-making in proportion to the degree one is effected". Depending on how interpreted, this can range from something rather communitarian to simple proportionality as an organizational member.
@brainpolice2 -- Everyone participates. Those who do not participate do so through their non-participation as in the market example. You want reality to be other than it is.
Paper money is a social construction arrived at by an intersubjective consensus. That doesn't mean everyone had equal input. MrCropper's bid of $5 didn't count for much but he still participated.
You wish to deny social reality and declare yourself a sovereign individual. You will fail at this.
I'm sorry, but I'm not the one denying social reality here. You're pretending that we have a purely participatory democracy or something, when that obviously is not the case. "Social reality" is that most political systems are oligarchal in structure and decision-making power is centralized. Your appeals to "reality" are shallow. And you need to stop assuming an absolute dichotomy between individual sovereignty and sociality. The choice isn't between atomism and communitarian conformism.
@brainpolice2 -- I was talking about the market example where everyone participates, even MrCropper when he choses to not participate.
This is also true in elections. You cast a vote even when you fail to vote. It is this reality of how social consensus is arrived at that it seems you wish to deny. You cannot not be a part of society. No matter how hard you try.
I never claimed that I'm not a part of society. What I'm denying is your absurd premise that simply because I am a part of a society, I inherently consent to whatever is the case. You're ignoring the social dynamics of power structures completely. Decision-making power is exclusive, centralized and oligarchal in the organizations that we are talking about. They are not defacto participatory democracies simply because people exist within their systematic contexts.
You as an individual may dissent, your dissent signifies your consent to participate. Intersubjectivity *requires* your dissent to operate. The Borg thanks you.
I don't agree that we do not live in a democracy. As imperfect as it may be. Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. Ultimately, even fascist regimes rule with the consent of the governed. At some point the people rise up and overthrow their rules. "Not rising up" is a form of consent.
The very language of "mind-independence" is a gigantic confusion for both proponents and opponents of moral discourse. But no, noone that I know of (including "moral realists") have ever claimed that morality actually constitutes a material object in itself that is somehow out there in the world. That's a stupid argument that some moral nihilists like to bring up ("Where is this magical barrier called 'rights' that protects me?"). Language games, language games.
Well to me it seems like either morality exists outside the realm of human though - in which case it could be studied objectively - or it doesn't - in which case it is subjective.
I would be willing to accept that this is a false dichotomy, but so far I haven't seen any convincing arguments.
The train of thought you're on seems to presuppose something along the lines of positivism or radical empiricism. Is it really the case that only language that functions to explicitly describe objects can be "true" or "meaningful"? Do numbers and mathematical concepts exist as mind-independant objects? No. Concepts in general can be said to "only exist in the realm of thought" in a sense. But do we dismiss all concepts as "meaningless" or "not existing"? This is a language issue.
Obviously if morals exist objectively then we are still dealing with a subjective concept or model of that objective reality, in the same way that other concepts describe subjectively, what (we hope) are facts about reality.
But this doesn't really bring us any closer to deciding whether there is some objective morality we should be aiming to discover and integrate into our model, or if we should simply be aiming to 'invent' our morals in such a way as the provide us the most subjective value.
Bringing in loaded terms like "objective" probably doesn't help this discourse. I'm questioning the very premise that some sort of exclusively empirical, material object-describing standard is the arbiter of truth value and meaning. My response to the fact that "morality" isn't some material object that we can empirically describe is "so what?". Neither is the vast majority of what we do in our language.
Hi Brainpolice2, I think that morality is quite a bit like the meanings of words, or numbers. I.e. it is something we make up, we don't discover. But if this is the case, why can't we make up a rule that taxation is moral? What is it that would make that wrong?
You could make up such a rule. What I'm trying to argue against in my comments to sharperguy is what I percieve to be a sort of positivist moral nihilism - so my motivation in this case is simply to defend "morality" in general rather than a specific morality. But to get to your question, I can only argue that it's wrong relative to inferences from other values. I would be tempted to say that if the claim is in dissonance with other values you hold, some tweaking is in order.
Excellent video.
Cimbolic 1 year ago
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a reductionist would not disagree with anything you said. the fact that you had to revert to explaining the workings of "society" through interactions by INDIVIDUALS only furthers the reductionists argument. there is nothing that cannot be wholly explained through the interactions of individuals and you cant explain anything without reverting to individuals acting. society, therefore is a completely useless concept. it only serves to simplify.
kcantens 2 years ago
Comment removed
kcantens 2 years ago
Well said as always, but I had no idea that people would debate this question. "Molecules never accomplish anything; atoms accomplish things!" Uh-huh. ;-)
AmusedChild 2 years ago
when philosophical train of thoughts fail to move in a significant way, we start playing semantics :P
LongHWin 2 years ago
Good video Randy, I think I understand your position far better now, and what you meant by intersubjectivity.
TheLovePizza 2 years ago
Let me throw in another thought here. I don't know much about philosophy so I don't think it would be responsible to commit to a technical term like intersubjectivity, but I think it's reasonable to liken the dignification of moral principles to the dignification of fiat currency. That seems like a proper analogy to me. But it looks like you're taking this, in which society defines what morality itself is, and saying therefore it also decides what specific things are moral.
ianw115 2 years ago
However, society is ultimately subject to its own definition of morality, regardless of whether that definition is reached intersubjectively or not. I don't think Bitbutter is arguing from his own personal indignation, he's saying taxation is inconsistent with society's own intersubjective understanding of morality.
ianw115 2 years ago
To draw another economic analogy, the US dollar is globally valued intersubjectively at a certain level of purchasing power, but if that valuation (as expressed in exchange rates) is out of alignment with the valuation of competing currencies, you'll have a currency crisis, because the current valuation is internally inconsistent.
ianw115 2 years ago
"he's saying taxation is inconsistent with society's own intersubjective understanding of morality."
I think that is a very good phrasing, ianw115.
TheLovePizza 2 years ago
Hey Randy, I'm glad you went back to the chalk board format, not that I don't like seeing ya, but this sentence is already a run-on so I'm gonna stop now.
niqueth 2 years ago
lol
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Excellent video. I agree that morality comes from inter-subjective consensus, but this clarified my argument for it. It's not majority rule as some label it, but a compromise reached among societies members.
TheNakedAtheist 2 years ago
Like the ones listed here, just about everything we consider a moral question I think deals with deciding between unfavorable options - At least those moral problems we consider "hard". Those are the ones which really put ethical theories to the test. An ethical theory like strict utilitarianism looks great on the drawing board, until you run such a problem through it and get an absurd outcome.
Ormaaj 2 years ago
Ok -- I think I see what you're getting at, but does it occur to you that the people who set the price (me and you) did so purely voluntarily?
unless I'm mistaken, in this circumstance no one is forced to buy or sell at a price they didn't agree on. How do you get from intersubjective agreement to acts of "moral" violence?
Secondly - I would like to point out that, yes, other peoples actions played a part in making the decision -- but it was a person who made it. not a conglomerate of people.
VeritasEtLibertas82 2 years ago
Hi VeritasEtLibertas82, in a majority rule moral code system, the people making the laws also do so purely voluntarily. I mean, yeah, if I think my stock is worth $200,000, nobody can force me to go to the marketplace and sell it for $100,000. If I don't like the price, I can leave the marketplace. But if you don't like the laws of society, you can leave society too, there are still lawless places on earth.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
I'm sorry but this analogy doesn't work at all.
in one case there is no violence in the other there is.
Why is this basic difference so hard for people to see?
VeritasEtLibertas82 2 years ago
Nobody is denying that if you want to stay in society, society will enforce its rules with force. Where we disagree, if we even do, is whether or not it is moral to initiate force or not, correct? Well, how do we answer moral questions? Different people have different answers. You might not like my answer, but it is a concrete proposal which has its advantages. What is your answer? Reasonable people should be able to give their reasons--what's your reason why initiation of force is wrong?
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
human rights to life and liberty.
But I repeat myself...
VeritasEtLibertas82 2 years ago
*chuckle*
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
There are no absolute morals -- hello there Nietzsche baby -- It seems to me libertarianism tries to ground morals in one's absolute self-ownership.
This cannot be done - hilarity ensues.
1noen1 2 years ago 2
Yes 1noen1, it does seem to me that libertarianism requires a belief in objective morals. The Objectivists make much truck of this, of course :-) It boggles my mind how anybody could both (A) believe in the cultural relativity of morals, and (B) belief in the absolute immorality of taxation. But, as you say, hilarity ensues.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Also, I don't really feel the force of your statement about the conglomerate of people. It is well acknowledged that competition plays a vital role in the marketplace, and competition is the conglomerate of other people who you could have made the deal with, but didn't.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
sorry -- perhaps I wasn't clear.
In your thought experiment each person involved made a decision, one consideration in that process was accounting for the decisions made by other people. At no point did an autonomous sentient being called society come into existence and make a decision. individual people made each discrete decision resulting in a kind of "average".
If this is actually what you mean when you say "society decides" then we don't disagree.
VeritasEtLibertas82 2 years ago
A rose by any other name. It is in this sense that I also belive that society determine what is and what isn't moral.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
quite right -- and I've never been one to quibble over the names of things.
However, misunderstanding society to be anything but a collection of individuals allows one to make all kinds of errors. That is my objection.
VeritasEtLibertas82 2 years ago
Randy, this admission is more important than the content of the video. You are not being altogether intellectually honest in your presentation. If this is your belief then you need to back it up, or we just have blatant propaganda dressed up as philosophical discourse on markets.
smotviddy 2 years ago
Hi smotviddy, I always discuss things in goodfaith and with goodwill. Life is too short to waist on bullshit. I have to admit, I don't know what you are objecting too here tho---what exactly do you think I did wrong?
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Comment removed
smotviddy 2 years ago
This has been flagged as spam show
Your "explanation" of intersubjectivity is merely a statement of belief - with an appeal to consensus - both to an abstract market "decision", and to a consensus opinion from the viewers of this video! If that's your morality then you are bankrupt.
smotviddy 2 years ago
I confess, I didn't understand your objection at all. Perhaps you can rephrase it?
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
You may need some time to think about it.
smotviddy 2 years ago
Ha, well, out of courtesy, I'll tell you I'm not going to spend any more time thinking about it. This vid already has over 100 comments on it from very smart people who are considerate enough to make themselves understood, and I don't have time enough to respond to all of them.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
I was perfectly clear in what I said. Perhaps I was too blunt?
smotviddy 2 years ago
Kudos, you have taken an argument that in its complexity could exhaust many hours of studious rebutting, and framed it in a manner that leaves little doubt as to its accuracy as a postulate of clarified conciseness.
Well done Sir.
MrVisions 2 years ago
thank-you, MrVisions.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
I dont know all that many anarchists who claim society doest exist while also explaining things away with the invisible hand. If your not straw manning, your at least cherry picking. There is no such thing as objective value, all value is subjective, and this is a basic understanding of many anarchist (at least the austrian ones). Your talking about reverse valuations, if we make an exchange where each values what their getting more than their giving, both parties profit, I'm glad you get it
lengthyounarther 2 years ago
I dont know how you can say paper money arises from an intersubjective consensus. Are you not familiar with the history of paper money? Historically paper money has been decreed by the state which often threatens the death penalty who does not use the paper. In america, paper started not a money, but as a money substitute redeemable in gold. The state then confiscated all the gold they could and then enacted penalties for anyone who did not accept the paper, a process you call consensus
lengthyounarther 2 years ago
Very interesting video. Definitely favorited. You ever consider becoming an economist?
4McClain 2 years ago
*chuckle* and do all that hard math???? :-)
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Love this board lectures.
2bsirius 2 years ago
Just to play devil's advocate here a little, how does this explain things like market crashes? I'm probably still misunderstanding, but it seems like the whole point there is that the market can misvalue things even intersubjectively.
ianw115 2 years ago
AWESOME question. Somebody who really believes in the free market would probably say something like the market never MISvalues something. But rather, the value of something can change very rapidly. If on thursday BRK.A is worth $100,000 a share, and on black friday, BRK.A is worth $1 a share, the true believer wouldn't say that the market was wrong on thursday--rather they would say that the market was right on both thursday and friday, its just the value changed rapidly.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
I suppose one could look at it that way, but it's not like these rapid changes just come out of the ether, there are reasons for it. Maybe BRK.A's P/E ratio was unsustainably high, something like that. Did you expect that the housing bubble would last forever? If not, why not?
ianw115 2 years ago
Yeah I'm going to think about these questions for a long time ianw115. Because in point of fact anybody who isn't a true believer in the market does say that the market misprices things, or that societies have made mistakes in their law codes,etc. The analogy of "bad law as market crash" is,I think, a very fruitful way of investigating such concerns.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
This certainly cleared up my stuff for me when it comes to inter-subjectivity. Thanks for making the video.
trondreitan 2 years ago
I don't see how we have to disagree in order to make social rules. I do understand that it is required in the stock market because in the stock market we are betting against each other. In the stock market you profit from the other person being less knowledgeable than you. But I don't see how that applies to social rules.
FatGermanBastard 2 years ago
Hi FatGermanBastard, I suppose I should clarify and say that I'm talking about rules which tell us what to do when we disagree about something. Suppose a teacher has sex with a student. Presumably they think that's ok, but presumably the parents of the student don't. The rules about age of consent are there to tell us what to do when these sorts of disagreements happen. If nobody ever disagreed about who had sex when with whom, we wouldn't need any moral laws about sex.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
@randyhelzerman
would you demand that I buy a certain stock or else I am evil and a bad person and need to be put into jail ?
FatGermanBastard 2 years ago
no.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Outstanding vid, as always. Your discussion about the market and intersubjective agreement is dead on.
I think the part where you started discussing morality wasn't as strong. It seemed that you tried to force an parallel where there isn't one. Your view that "disagreement is the engine of intersubjective agreement" was very convincingly established with your market example, but I think you pressed when you tried to apply it with moral examples.
VeryEvilPettingZoo 2 years ago
(cont)
I think FGB's objection still works.
1) You say you're discussing morality, but it actually seems to be more about law. They're different. It's easy to find examples of laws, even in a legitimate democracy, that are immoral (Ex: Jim Crow laws).
2) Morality is only a concern because we're sometimes tempted to violate it. The relevance here being, the teacher and student might agree that their behavior is wrong.
VeryEvilPettingZoo 2 years ago
(cont)
When I take your "disagreement is the engine of intersubjective agreement", and apply it to the prohibition against murder (both moral and legal), I don't think it works. Excluding some criminals and lunatics, the prohibition against murder seems to be universally accepted. That degree of agreement makes it more firmly ensconced. That's the opposite relationship as with your market example, where everyone agreeing on a stock valuation basically shut that market down.
VeryEvilPettingZoo 2 years ago
Hi V.E.P.Z, sure, I ran out of time at the endof the vid to elaborate; I hope to make a better video to explain further. (1) yes, there is a distinction between laws and morality. we do say that laws can be wrong. But if a law is wrong, what makes it wrong? My answer is the law runs counter to intersubjective consensus (victims of jim crow will agree they haven't been consensed :-) I realize this answer has its drawbacks, but what else could make a law morally wrong?
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
(cont, to V.E.P.Z) (2) yes, morality is only a concern when we're tempted to violate it. I.E. if nobody ever murdered, the business of making laws about murder and enforcing them would be shut down, the same way that the business of selling BRK.A would be shut down if everybody valued it the same. Doesn't mean people wouldn't give value to it--its just there would be no marketplace for it.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
I'd say that a law is wrong for the same reason that an action is wrong - by weighing the justification for it, and range of consequences of it, in light of upholding the value of every individual life lived. In the case of laws, the consequences include the value of the entire social structure, which makes things much hairier. Barring obvious moral violations (like Jim Crow laws), I think the question of morality of laws hinges mainly on the legitimacy of the system by which the laws were made.
VeryEvilPettingZoo 2 years ago
(cont)
For morality, one paragraph comments aren't enough space for anyone :) But I disagree that society determines morality. (Other than as trivially linguistic - moral language is determined by social conventions, though that doesn't touch the reasons for moral claims.) Society is also a major context by which consequences are evaluated. I'd say that a just society is the most important intermediate moral value, as it most fully enhances the primary values of morality's concern.
VeryEvilPettingZoo 2 years ago
I don't understand why you paid $100,000. Why didn't you pay $95,000?
If you both agree on the value of something, why you would not trade?
I'm sorry... there may be truth in what you say, but your example is just baffling. I think it's way too simplified to establish your point.
Anarchism does not exclude supply and demand. In theory it should align itself with supply and demand. So why would the marketplace fail to function?
I have problems with anarchism, but I can't see a conflict here.
Brascofarian 2 years ago
@Brascofarian, this analogy works on the assumption of stock trading, where the aim is to make material gain. Assuming that items x and y are valued at exactly equal worth: if you want to gain, why would you trade something that is worth $100,000 for $100,000 dollars? You've lost $100,000, and gained $100,000. In that case you might as well hold on to your stock; any trade would be literally worthless for everyone.
SkepticsClaw 2 years ago
Well said SkepticsClaw, does that clear it up for you Brascofarian?
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Not really... I would argue that if they are looking for a profit then they value their holding at +$100,000. Then there are other issues such as liquidity and opportunity cost... like I say, it's too simplified.
I don't think this gets away from simple supply and demand mechanisms that are not affected by anarchism in principle.
Brascofarian 2 years ago
You could just as easily ask why didn't he pay $105,000.
Both parties in the example felt that they were making a gain. In either of the alternative cases this would not be true.
sharperguy 2 years ago
Everything you're saying is exactly what anarcho-capitalism is about.
The only thing that anarchists don't talking about is the absence of inter-subjectivity.
The point is that the state is the OPPOSITE of an inter-subjective consensus, because it simply tries to set a one size fits all solution.
sharperguy 2 years ago
I'd say that the state (in the very general sense of its basic legitimacy) is a particular intersubjective consensus, and there simply is no such thing as "*the* intersubjective consensus". In other words, unless one ultimately arbits in one direction or another between multiple intersubjective consensuses by appealing to something outside of it (or simply majoritarianism), you're left with a stalemate in which the pro and anti state positions have no more claim to "truth" over the other.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Ok what I mean was that state solutions are not inter-subjective. Of course the state itself is an inter-subjective consensus - and this is the only thing that allows it to exist.
There is no real way to determine 100% absolute facts. At the moment the scientific method is usually considered the best way to convince people of whether something is true or not, but even this is decided intersubjectivly.
sharperguy 2 years ago
They're not intersubjective relative to those who don't agree with them already, but this makes the state no *less* intersubjective than any proposition you make that others don't already agree with. This is the trap that intersubjectivity lays for the anti-statist.
I didn't say anything about absolute certainty, only "truth" in general. As far as science goes, I'd insist that it doesn't represent the only area of knowledge that contains "truth" and "meaning".
brainpolice2 2 years ago
*chuckle* I'm not trying to lay any trap for the statist, but you are right, I'm just trying to point out that cooperation happens all the time even when people don't agree. Going back to the marketplace analogy. I might think a stock I own is worth more than the marketplace says it does. In fact, if I didn't, I wouldn't own the stock. Nevertheless, if I want to, say, use the stock as collateral for a loan or something, its the market price, and not my personal price, which counts.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Randy, I'm not accusing you of laying a trap, although my language could have been more clear. I'm actually saying that the anti-statist lays a trap for themselves when the relativistic implications of an intersubjectivist account is brought to light and they themselves want to work within that framework. I view the state vs. anti-state argument as a functional stalemate in that framework.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Hi sharperguy, the market chooses a price for a stock which might not be the price I want the stock to be at. Similarly, society might make a law which other people agree with, but you don't. How come you think everybody should pay the market price, but you don't think everybody should follow the law? They were both set in the same way.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
This the fundamental fallacy that lies at the heart of democracy.
Let me answer with a question. Do you think that an optimal solution would be reached if all parties had to vote on what the price be, and then be disallowed from paying/charging any other price?
sharperguy 2 years ago
Hi sharperguy, but that's exactly what happens with stock prices. It doesn't matter if I think BRK.A is worth $200,000 a share---if I go to a banker to get a loan, using my stock as a collateral, he has to treat it as if it were worth $100,000 a share--the market price. If he didn't, he would be stealing from his depositors. And yes, I think there should be laws against stealing.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Person A having less 'paper money' than person B makes him objectively more influential in the world, so your categorization of value being a purely subjective attribute is a bit problematic, isn't it?
TheMariborchan 2 years ago
Only because those people subjectivley view that money as legitimately valuable.
That's like saying the word blue can objectively be associated with a certain wavelength of light because if you say something is blue, most people will come to the same conclusion about what that means - even though the use of the word blue or red to refer to that colour is an arbitrary, inter-subjective decision.
sharperguy 2 years ago
well saiid sharperguy.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
@sharperguy It doesn't matter why, the fact is that the value here called 'subjective' has an objective effect, thereby making the whole distinction useless in this case in my opinion. It doesn't really matter why value 'has this power' since I was problematizing the categorization, not the cause.
TheMariborchan 2 years ago
Hi the Mariborchan, I don't think value is a purely subjective attribute--I think its an intersubjective attribute. The reason wealthier people have more influence is that everybody agrees to give them more influence. When they stop doing so (e.g. when runaway inflation causes a currency to collapse) their influance evaporates.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Not to disrupt your interactions with others, but what people are fundamentally disagreeing with is precisely this claim that everyone agrees. It seems like you're saying that whatever happens to be the case, everybody agrees or consents to it. But, to me, it makes no sense to say "everybody agrees", in your example, relative to, say, a socialist. Not only do they ideologically disagree, but I have trouble seeing how they could be said to "consent" to circumstances largely beyond their control.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
I think, at best, you can make the case that most people asqueisce to the circumstances. But I don't think you can maintain the claim that everyone agrees, let alone consents, to a situation that they ideologically disagree with and that involves social dynamics in which they do not have decision-making power relative to others. I think that pre-existing power structures and disparities in decision-making power preclude the possibility of explicit consent.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
About the society and market thing: I actually agree insofar as libertarians sometimes sound like social atomists. But I think the spirit of the claim is more like this: don't anthropomorphisize "society" (or markets for that matter). So, I wouldn't claim "societies don't exist". What I would claim is that "societies don't act as a single entity and there are problems that arise when the term is used too generally in a way that obscures diversity or internal conflict". It's a language issue.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
When someone says "society decided that ...." as a defense of something, and there clearly are dissenters to the thing in question, libertarians resist this because the statement seems to obscure the clear fact that there are plenty of people that never explicitly had anything to do with deciding on the thing in question, and yet are effected by it. So that it ends up seeming like a gigantic appeal to the majority (or even something obscuring something much more heirarchical).
brainpolice2 2 years ago
I would definitely agree with this.
One thing that makes anarchists cringe is when people claim that "country X is at war with country Y" when really it is the governments of those countries which have declared war.
sharperguy 2 years ago
I think the fundamental point is that you can't actually claim "X is moral" (and, by extension, defend the state ethically) by appealing to intersubjective consensus. IC is at best just "descriptive ethics", as in "this is just what people do or think". But it has absolutely no sway in terms of an argument trying to say "this is what is actually right or wrong".
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Hi brainpolice2, what is your alternative proposal? What does say what is acutally right or wrong?
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Honestly, I don't think it's necessary for me to answer that in order to maintain an opposition to the intersubjectivist arguments. All that is sufficient for me to do that is to point out that intersubjectivity cannot derive an ought from an is (or, epistemologically speaking, justify a truth claim in general) with any more authority than other ethical theories. If we don't think "truth" claims can be justified by mere agreement or popularity, intersubjectivity isn't going to sway us.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
I mean, this is kind of like Marx saying "the free market can't determine what something is worth. All it does is determine what people think its worth."
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
I see the analogy. However, subjective theories of value in economics are generally not meant to apply to ethical value (although some libertarians actually do make such conclusions about ethics from it - I think they're confusing fields or misapplying the methodology). In fact, Mises went out of his way to say that austrian economics cannot judge people's ends or values themselves, and he insisted on a methodological dualism demarkating the boundary of economics.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Hi Brainpolice2, I can understand if you say (a) we SHOULD pay the market price for good but (b) we SHOULD NOT necessarily follow intersubjectively negotiated moral laws. But I'm interested in why. I mean, I know you have a better reason than just "I disagree" or "I have a book which says you are wrong". Is it that you have an alternate account of where these morals come from? Or something else? Just curious.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
Well, to be clear, I wouldn't even necessarily say "we should pay the market price for a good" (and I think that there are various factors contributing to prices in actually-existing economies that warp that price from what could really be said to be "the market price"). I'm saying that economics, in the way the Austrians like Mises methodologically set it up, can only describe the market process. So I'm really trying to distinguish the descriptive from the prescriptive.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Hi brainpolice2, let me clarify; for example, somebody who believes in a minimum wage denies that we should pay market rates for wages. Are you denying that we should pay market prices in this sense? If you think that minimum wage laws are morally wrong, then you do think the market has moral suasion. It isn't a case of going from the descriptive to the prescriptive: this is a case of how we invent a new prescriptive law. Its not inference, its invention.
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
From a left-libertarian free market perspective, actual free market prices would likely be comparatively benevolent. So, first off, I'm distinguishing "free market prices" from "market prices in current mixed economies". So, from my POV, we're being shifed in current markets. But beyond this, I'm trying to sharply distinguish economics from ethical philosophy. Economics can't explicitly tell us what we should or shouldn't do, although perhaps it can inform an ethical theory.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Hi Brainpolice2, I can go with that. By the same token, an intersubjectivist would say that in a free marketplace of ideas, where nobody is coerced into voting one way or another, the intersubjectively arrived at moral laws are likely to be comparatively benevolent, and thus can inform ethical theory. Does that have a plausible ring to you?
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
I guess the big thing we're running into is that while you're describing things as intersubjectively arrivated at, I'm not seeing it as a consistently consensual process. I'm seeing it, on the positive end, as involving an alienation of many individuals from a meaningful participation, and on the negative end, as being imposed on many individuals without them having a meaningful choice to not be subject to it. If "liberty" is viewed as something meta-normative, "liberty" seems lacking here.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Hi brainpolice2, is it really any more or less liberty than setting the stock prices, tho? I mean, suppose I think that BRK.A is worth $200,000, but the market price is only $100,000. Is it a violation of my liberty that I cannot choose to sell it at $200,000? There are a lot of people who feel alienated from society because they do not have enough money to buy health insurance for their kids. Just because I feel like I'm not at liberty doesn't mean I'm not, what's the difference?
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
I'm thinking of liberty not in the specific terms you present here, but in terms of having a choice or not period. So I don't think of it as quantative decision between two different things, but the space to make a decision for yourself in the first place ("positive liberty"), as well as the space to not necessarily be subject to the decisions of others ("negative liberty"). In positive liberty terms, the state is non-participatory. In negative liberty terms, it's non-opt-outable.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
I think of it more as analogous to whether I can invest or not in the first place. If I had no choice but to invest, it'd be a negative liberty infringement. If I had no choice to invest, it'd be a positive liberty infringement. But, to continue the analogy, I don't see the situation as being one in which everyone is meaningfully empowered or included to participate on one hand and meaningfully be given the space to not be subject to the system on the other hand. Circumstances are oligarchal.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Hi brainpolice2, ok, well, if I don't have $100,000, I cannnot invest in the first place. Have I been denied positive liberty? If I do not have $800 a month, I cannot buy health insurance. Have I been denied positive liberty? There is a marketplace for healthcare plans, if none of them are affordable to him, has he been denied liberty? There are also a marketplace of societies available, have you been deined positive liberty if you don't like the choices available to you?
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
I'm speaking of positively liberty as the empowerment to participate at all. I don't think of it as the same thing having necessities like enough money to afford something, but simple decision-making if one being effected by a given organization. The socialist anarchists usually call this "decision-making in proportion to the degree one is effected". Depending on how interpreted, this can range from something rather communitarian to simple proportionality as an organizational member.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
@brainpolice2 -- Everyone participates. Those who do not participate do so through their non-participation as in the market example. You want reality to be other than it is.
Paper money is a social construction arrived at by an intersubjective consensus. That doesn't mean everyone had equal input. MrCropper's bid of $5 didn't count for much but he still participated.
You wish to deny social reality and declare yourself a sovereign individual. You will fail at this.
1noen1 2 years ago
I'm sorry, but I'm not the one denying social reality here. You're pretending that we have a purely participatory democracy or something, when that obviously is not the case. "Social reality" is that most political systems are oligarchal in structure and decision-making power is centralized. Your appeals to "reality" are shallow. And you need to stop assuming an absolute dichotomy between individual sovereignty and sociality. The choice isn't between atomism and communitarian conformism.
brainpolice2 2 years ago 2
@brainpolice2 -- I was talking about the market example where everyone participates, even MrCropper when he choses to not participate.
This is also true in elections. You cast a vote even when you fail to vote. It is this reality of how social consensus is arrived at that it seems you wish to deny. You cannot not be a part of society. No matter how hard you try.
1noen1 2 years ago
I never claimed that I'm not a part of society. What I'm denying is your absurd premise that simply because I am a part of a society, I inherently consent to whatever is the case. You're ignoring the social dynamics of power structures completely. Decision-making power is exclusive, centralized and oligarchal in the organizations that we are talking about. They are not defacto participatory democracies simply because people exist within their systematic contexts.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
You as an individual may dissent, your dissent signifies your consent to participate. Intersubjectivity *requires* your dissent to operate. The Borg thanks you.
I don't agree that we do not live in a democracy. As imperfect as it may be. Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. Ultimately, even fascist regimes rule with the consent of the governed. At some point the people rise up and overthrow their rules. "Not rising up" is a form of consent.
1noen1 2 years ago
This assumes that morals exist outside the realm of human thought.
sharperguy 2 years ago
The very language of "mind-independence" is a gigantic confusion for both proponents and opponents of moral discourse. But no, noone that I know of (including "moral realists") have ever claimed that morality actually constitutes a material object in itself that is somehow out there in the world. That's a stupid argument that some moral nihilists like to bring up ("Where is this magical barrier called 'rights' that protects me?"). Language games, language games.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Well to me it seems like either morality exists outside the realm of human though - in which case it could be studied objectively - or it doesn't - in which case it is subjective.
I would be willing to accept that this is a false dichotomy, but so far I haven't seen any convincing arguments.
sharperguy 2 years ago
The train of thought you're on seems to presuppose something along the lines of positivism or radical empiricism. Is it really the case that only language that functions to explicitly describe objects can be "true" or "meaningful"? Do numbers and mathematical concepts exist as mind-independant objects? No. Concepts in general can be said to "only exist in the realm of thought" in a sense. But do we dismiss all concepts as "meaningless" or "not existing"? This is a language issue.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Obviously if morals exist objectively then we are still dealing with a subjective concept or model of that objective reality, in the same way that other concepts describe subjectively, what (we hope) are facts about reality.
But this doesn't really bring us any closer to deciding whether there is some objective morality we should be aiming to discover and integrate into our model, or if we should simply be aiming to 'invent' our morals in such a way as the provide us the most subjective value.
sharperguy 2 years ago
Bringing in loaded terms like "objective" probably doesn't help this discourse. I'm questioning the very premise that some sort of exclusively empirical, material object-describing standard is the arbiter of truth value and meaning. My response to the fact that "morality" isn't some material object that we can empirically describe is "so what?". Neither is the vast majority of what we do in our language.
brainpolice2 2 years ago
Hi Brainpolice2, I think that morality is quite a bit like the meanings of words, or numbers. I.e. it is something we make up, we don't discover. But if this is the case, why can't we make up a rule that taxation is moral? What is it that would make that wrong?
randyhelzerman 2 years ago
You could make up such a rule. What I'm trying to argue against in my comments to sharperguy is what I percieve to be a sort of positivist moral nihilism - so my motivation in this case is simply to defend "morality" in general rather than a specific morality. But to get to your question, I can only argue that it's wrong relative to inferences from other values. I would be tempted to say that if the claim is in dissonance with other values you hold, some tweaking is in order.
brainpolice2 2 years ago