It reminds me of my daily personal devotional reading years ago. 😉

If the goal of morality is our personal satisfaction, then it is hard to think of anything more important than understanding what it takes to maximize it.

But what if you don’t want X? Ought I want X?

Maybe.

Your desire is correct or not according to whether it is rational and informed.

So, if you want money, but really you want satisfaction, and you will fail to achieve satisfaction by pursuing money but would achieve satisfaction being less avaricious, then your desire for money is irrational (it objectively is not what you would want if you thought about what you wanted rationally and informedly, rather than irrationally and ignorantly).

False desires lead to self-defeating behaviors (they will tank satisfaction rather than maximize it). So the demarcation between false and true desires is whether they derive from (or align with) informed and rational thought, or not.

This is the same as all hypothetical imperatives. A surgeon who wants to save the patient’s life ought to sterilize their insruments. If the surgeon “does not want” to sterilize their instruments (yet easily could), then their desire is false, because they would then (objectively) falsely believe that not sterilizing instruments will achieve their goal of saving the patient’s life. As the belief is false, so is the desire that is derived from it. Whereas a true belief (that sterilization is necessary to maximizing the goal of saving a patient’s life) would entail a defensibly true ought-statement (it is then objectively true that the surgeon ought to sterilize).

All imperative propositions derive their truth value in the same way. Because they all entail a belief that if X, then Y will result and a belief that Y is desired more than Z. If either is false (if X will not lead to Y, or the agent doesn’t actually want Y more than Z; or indeed, would not, if they thought about it logically and knew what the outcomes would really be), then the imperative proposition is false.

Meanwhile, don’t confuse imagination with empathy, or virtual models with fictions. A model of reality is not properly a fiction, as its purpose is to track reality as closely as possible. It is therefore more like history or biography than fiction. This is different from just making stuff up (actual fiction). Believing someone is happy when they are not is fiction. Believing someone is not happy when they are indeed not happy is discernment. Because it is an objective fact of the world that they are not happy.

All consciousness is an illusion and thus a “fiction” in an over-broad sense; but that is not the sense actually used in practice, however. All books and documentaries are “fiction” in that overbroad sense, because they are all constructs (a history book is not the history itself but a representation of it, or at least an attempted representation). But this is not what we mean by fiction when describing books and films. So there is a danger in falling into an equivocation fallacy here.

For more on this point see What Does It Mean to Call Consciousness an Illusion?

I like this, and also how you show (correctly, in my opinion) that Kant’s deontology is merely a form of the hypothetical imperative disguised as something more authoritative in nature.

But what if you don’t want X? Ought I want X? In your debate with Comfort I see you claim something to the effect of “every sane person wants X” as a matter of objective fact, which seems somewhat like shifting an ought to an is, although I could be misunderstanding you.

If X = happiness and satisfaction, and Y = practice empathy, I’m in agreement with you, however in my empathetic practice I can imagine someone not desiring happiness and satisfaction above all else. Am I imagining an insane person, by some definition you are using for sanity? Or is happiness and satisfaction desired by everyone, sane and insane alike, by the definition of happiness? Or is my example of imagining someone who doesn’t want happiness not actually a practice of empathy? (These are not exclusive-or’s, as they can all be true or all be false with respect to what you are claiming.)

What I enjoy about discussions of morality is that the practice of empathy is fundamentally a process of fiction. Imagining yourself as the recipient of abuse, like you described to Comfort in the rape example, and trying to feel the fear and pain experienced by that victim as well as her viewing her abuser as a monster, ought to deter you from doing so because you would experience a sense of horror about the person you would become should you follow through with this desire to abuse. This is ideally based on fiction and it never happens, rather than an historically based fiction where you are imagining all of this in reflection of a past event that you perpetrated.

I like the tension between “fiction” and the “true moral facts” derived from this process. This is why, for example, I generally disregard things like discussions over the historicity of Jesus. That said, I do now see the benefits of your pure-myth approach to that particular question, because I see that getting at the author’s intentions in writing that fiction (in spite of the fact that every history is still a story) is affected by whether the main character actually existed but was heavily mythologized or didn’t exist and was invented from whole-cloth.

1) Indeed, Rob legally lacks knowledge and intent and thus would be acquitted in a court of law. That’s why no one is held accountable for these things. Only choosing (actus reus) with knowledge and intent (mens rea) is morally (or in many cases legally) wrong.

There are actual real world scenarios like this. For example, a contract killer conceals a live but unconscious person in an industrial trash compactor and the morning shift completes the compaction unaware of the fact that their regular duties were killing a person. No court will convict them of even wrongful death.

In terms of moral reasoning, moral knowledge is always tautologically limited to what is known. You can only ever know what the right thing to do is given what you know. This is based on a basic ethical principle of force majeure: you cannot be liable for not doing something that was impossible to do. If it’s impossible to know the actual consequences of pushing a button, then the one who pushes it cannot be liable for it. In philosophical terms, any imperative proposition of the form “you ought to do what is impossible to do” is always false (moral action must be possible in order to be imperative).

As this is already standard in world legal systems and all practiced moral systems, it poses no problem for mine.

2) Here more detail is needed to asses. For example, what is meant by “killing 1000 random people is morally good”? Can you even describe a real world scenario where that is true? How we evaluate it then depends on the particulars you describe. It sounds like you are imagining a Trolley Problem, which can bump against contradictory human psychology.

Let’s imagine a real world case:

An Ebola outbreak unexpectedly starts wiping out the population of California, killing 90% of everyone it infects, and it is spreading fast. You have a chemical that, if you snuck it into California’s water supplies, both cures and inoculates everyone against Ebola, but it kills 1 in every 40,000 people who drinks the tainted water (so, it will kill “1000 random people” but save the lives of tens of millions). Is it moral to sneak the chemical into all of California’s reservoirs?

Generally the answer is “No.” And in law, it’s definitely no. That would be a crime. Because it is not necessary. You could, instead, tell everyone what the chemical does and let them choose their own risk level of dying. And you’ll notice that’s what governments did during covid (they did not force anyone to take a vaccine; they gave you a choice, and then mitigated everyone’s risk around you, e.g. if your choice made you dangerous, you would be kept by various policies from infecting others until you were certifiably safe to be around).

So to get it to be “moral” to do it against everyone’s will, you have to make the scenario ridiculous (this is why movie plots that justify things like this always have to be convoluted and bizarre). For example, the plague will magically kill everyone in one hour unless you set off a neutrino burst (using a machine you just happen to have in your garage), whose effects across California will be as above (it will kill 1000 Californians at random but prevent the deaths of the remaining 30 million or so, and have no other effects of substance).

Most people would agree setting off the device in that scenario is moral: because it was necessary. In terms of force majeure, you only have two actions possible relative to the situation: do nothing (and thus choosing to kill 30 million people) or activate the device (and thus choosing to kill only 1000 people). In most real world cases, there are not only those two options (per above). So you have to imagine really convoluted cases. This has been done before (the film Fail Safe is about exactly this kind of scenario, and to get there its plot requires an extremely curated sequence of events to justify the final decision, by conveniently walling off—rendering impossible—all other options).

Now to your question:

Could anyone be morally convinced that that was the scanerio they were in when they actually were not? That’s extremely hard to imagine. Either you’d have to be the stupidest person on the planet (as in, literally mentally disabled) or extremely negligent (and extreme negligence is itself immoral), or otherwise insane (like a schizophrenic hallucinating the whole bizarre movie plot and incapable of realizing it’s not real). The first and third cases will be acquitted on an insanity defense (because knowing what they did was wrong was literally impossible, so there was for them no other possible action classifiable as moral). The second case will get you convicted on a thousand counts of negligent homicide.

This is, again, because moral action is always constrained by what is known. Knowledge and intent determines right action; and no one can ever be expected to do impossible things. Such an expectation would itself be immoral. This is, again, inherent in all legal and moral systems.

1) Rob is deceived into thinking that the red button in front of him cures cancer. However, in reality, this button actually kills 1000 people. Being deceived, Rob presses the button and kills 1000 people. It seems like in this case we don’t think that Rob is blameworthy for his action.

2) Rob is deceived into thinking that killing 1000 random people is morally good. He knows that the button will kill 1000 people and still decides to press it. In this case, it seems, some people (at least those that I asked like my coworkers) are hesitant to absolve Rob from moral blame.

If moral facts actually exist, then it seems possible to not know them, like we don’t know some non-moral facts. However, I am interested, why then does it seem (to some people at least) that not knowing moral facts absolves less of the blameworthiness than not knowing some non-moral facts? I am very interested in your response, because you said that moral facts are facts of the natural world, so it seems like they should act just like non-moral facts.

Knowledge and intent.

That is the responsibility-maker everywhere for everyone in all real world situations regardless of their philosophy.

These philosophers are standard ivory tower composers of useless nonsense. They are disregarding what words like “responsibility” even mean, like in a court of law for example, and so their opinions have no relevance to reality. They can be dismissed as simply non-responsive.

See my article Free Will in the Real World … and Why It Matters.

“Responsibility is impossible because there is no responsibility-maker and there needs to be one if people are morally responsible. The two most plausible candidates, psychology and decision, fail. A person is not responsible for an unchosen psychology or a psychology that was chosen when the person is not responsible for the choice. This can be seen in intuitions about instantly-created and manipulated people. This result is further supported by the notion that, in general, the right, the good, and virtue rest on the exercise of a capacity rather than the capacity itself. It is also supported by the notion that negligence is not a responsibility maker.”

“A person is not responsible for a choice that does not reflect his psychology or that does reflect it when he is not responsible for the psychology. This can be seen by considering intuitions regarding acts that are unconnected or arbitrarily connected to a person’s psychology. It can also be seen intuitions about acts that result from a manipulated psychology. The problem with choice as a foundation can be further seen in that an infinite or self-created person would not be responsible despite these superhuman choice-related features. “

What is the responsibility-maker of your Goal Theory? Does it have one?

I’m actually composing an article now that just happens to address many of these issues. It will be out in a week or two (if I don’t finish it tomorrow). It will incorporate what I’ve already said…

Q1: See my comment here.

Q2: If you actually mean moral relativism, then see Objective Moral Facts. If you instead mean cultural differences vis-a-vis epistemology (science, logic, math) or its concomitant effect on industry (leveraging up a civilization’s capabilities and productivity and “energy return on investment”), I don’t have anything comprehensive, but you can get an idea from No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience.

Q3: The question itself is a category error. Meaning isn’t the sort of thing anything “should” have—apart from conditions entailing it. Hence it only either exists or it doesn’t.

Perhaps what you meant to ask is something like “can’t we have morality even if nothing has any meaning,” to which the answer is, “Actually, no, since if nothing means anything, then nothing is worthwhile, and if nothing is worthwhile, there is no reason to do anything, and if there is no reason to do anything, then there is no reason to do ‘morality’ either.”

Thus it is not that life “should” have meaning; it’s that life does have meaning, and therefore there are things that are worth doing, and therefore necessarily there are moral facts. Since those are just “that which you ought most do,” and it is logically necessarily the case that if there is anything you ought do, then there is something you ought most do (just as “if there is a quantity of apples in each of ten baskets, there is a largest quantity of apples in at least one of those baskets”).

But you may be tripping yourself up on what “meaning” means here. To have meaning in this sense just means to have value, and a value worth pursuing. Ergo, if nothing has meaning, then nothing has value, much less a value worth pursuing. And all that’s required for life to have any meaning for you is anything that has value to you that can only be obtained or facilitated while you are alive. See my discussion and links in §9 here.

I call my distinct moral theory Goal Theory. This prevents anyone mis-assigning claims to it by choosing any other label for it. There is only one Goal Theory, so no one (other than the lazy) can confuse me as advocating something I didn’t: they simply have to read what my position is. The label cannot mislead.

For instance, Goal Theory is technically a form of Desire Utilitarianism, but saying that is misleading because people assume a dozen things are entailed by desire utilitarianism that are not, and thus immediately mistake my theory for saying what it doesn’t: hence producing an entire debate between Goal Theory and Desire Utilitarianism. Thus illustrating the complete uselessness of labels.

The same happens with “Ethical Egoism,” rendering that phrase even more useless. It’s like saying “a mammal lives in my house” and the one thing they never think to realize is that I mean me; because people mistake “mammal” as meaning “nonhuman.” This is why labels are so useless in philosophy; philosophers rarely use them in any disciplined way, but simply stumble all over baggage fallacies, like someone who constantly forgets that we are mammals.

Meanwhile, Ethical Naturalism refers to any naturalist moral theory, not just mine.

And you are right, Secular Humanism refers to the ethical content of Goal Theory, not to Goal Theory itself.

This is the important distinction between ethics and metaethics: Kantianism and Utilitarianism are metaethical theories; but a Kantian or a Utilitarian can use those metaethical theories to defend everything from anarcho-capitalist to marxist ethical systems, or from Christian to Secular Humanist ethical systems, so knowing they are a Kantian or a Utilitarian actually tells you nothing about their ethics, as in what specific things they will conclude are moral or not.

Moreover, my ethical system is a kind of secular humanism; it is not coterminious with all kinds of secular humanism. It is thus not “Secular Humanism,” it is secular humanist.

So I think you may be confusing mammals with species of mammal here. Another reason labels are useless. Look how astray they have led you already? Attempting to peg a label to something is usually a bad sign in philosophy: it means you want to force some position into some other position. Better to ask why you want to do that, rather than make any attempt to actually do it. This shouldn’t be the case (science gets along fine labeling things without generating endless baggage fallacies); but alas, philosophy has failed to establish any disciplined behavior in employing labels properly. So it is best to try never to use them when you can do as well without them.

My question is: What label would you use to describe your moral worldview/theory/outlook?

You use terms such as ‘Ethical Naturalism (EN)’, ‘Goal Theory (GT)’ and ‘Secular Humanism (SH)’, but which of these is what you would call your view of morality as a whole? EN (I think) is your position on moral semantics/moral ontology, but regarding the others, I don’t quite know. EN deals with metaethics, but GT and SH confuse me. As far as Normative Ethics goes, you’re an Ethical Egoist (I think). So where would GT and SH fall into? Would SH be your general approach to Applied Ethics? But then what would GT be, Ethics in general?

Sorry if this is a lot to unpack.