Personal note: I should have trial results by the end of the week, manufacturing started by the end of the month, and an FDA response by the beginning of April, in case you all are wondering.
Interesting perspective. Not disagreeing with it. I just note, what I see as the deeper problem: ethical philosophy is built upon sand.
Unlike physics or chemistry, there are no real objective 'facts' to be had. This is why one simply ignores its conclusions when they seem wrong. One understands the bedrock assumptions themselves are forever up to interpretation, and logically constructed edifices upon such foundations all the more so.
I talked to one of my fellow moral realists about this before deciding to reply. I am familiar with your work as a hostage negotiator because I have made a module for my students on the Shirley A. Allen case in Illinois. Anyway, it's important to remember that the relativism that serves one well in your professional capacity needs to be bracketed away when making claims about normative ethics. Of course you must tell people they're not evil in order to stop them from doing additional evil. I get that. Notions of objectivity would get in your way. However, the side you're on and the side they are on permit no confusion. To tie it back to science, think of how physics relied on the Bohr Model for a long while. It put man on the moon even as it was later proven imperfect. Objectivity is found in ethical models the same way. We can make up thought exercises, engage in dialectic, and then we become objective according to coherence to the frame of reference of the model. Emotivists and relativists get turned in circles because their claims are self-defeating, sprawling, and deny ancient ideas of techne that have stood up to inquiry for thousands of years. It's not the take you want. You can't see ethics anymore than you can see a quark, but both are assuredly there regardless of whether the senses privilege their existence. Disagreement about particulars should not be attributed as evidence of non-existence. Rant over.
Alas I am the Dan Oblinger of lesser-fame than the Hostage Negotiator. I am a PhD from Illinois, and I do know the frustration of having my field of AI attacked by outsiders w/o full understanding of it. So please forgive any ignorance shown here, it is not intentional.
You provide a compelling vision of objectivity in Ethics, one that I had not thought through fully before. Still it seems that this objectivity is not as crisp as it is across most of the sciences.
In the sciences observations must be replicable in order to be accepted, thus in most science there is a very enumerable list of observations that must be accounted for. These are very crisply expressed in language that brook little disagreement regarding whether a given observation is or is not consistent with a given theory.
I am unaware if there are formalized framings of these thought experiments that would allow such unambiguous assessment of their relation to a give ethical model. Also it seems the space of thought experiments is not enumerated in anything those in most sciences. It feels to this outsider that each major ethical model has its bevy of thought experiments that justify that model. And others have their somewhat disjointed thought experiments. Tomorrow yet a new theory could be proposed as long as one could frame thought experiments to justify it, then it could join the pantheon of notable ethical theories. Importantly it would not need to supplant earlier theories in order to do this.
To this outsider it seems different in the sense that in hard sciences, even a SINGLE observation, if reliable enough, is enough to fully debunk a previous theory. Eventually this leads to the rejection of a present theory in favor of a newer one that accounts for ALL prior observations along with the new discordant observation. This does not seem the way ethical philosophy proceeds. Perhaps medical sciences bears some relation here? Because the human body is so complex, and our ability to execute strong experiments is ethically constrained, we often have correlational observations that disagree with a theory, yet we cannot definitively rule the theory out. One must find many such discrepancies to kill a theory. Still, even in medical sciences we do have progress where certain mainstream theories are widely a accepted then later widely rejected on the basis of new evidence. As I understand it ethical philosophy generally does not proceeds in this fashion. (though there is a kind of progress since the questions of today are different than 100 years ago.)
It occurs to me an interesting (and massive) agenda might be to model ethical philosophy more directly as an empirical science. In such a world there would be experimentalists that generally do not focus on theory, but instead look to uncover observations that disagree with existing theory. When found they simply publish the novel observation--which is accepted as a valid and strong advancement of the field. In Ethical Philosophy I guess this would be a kind of psychologist that formulates thought experiments that they believe human subjects would agree with, but that also disagree the widely accepted theories of the day. They would then empirically validate that indeed human subjects indeed react as imagined. This would result in a growing body of consensus thought experimental observations that nearly all human subjects agree with. To really follow this agenda one might need to invent a formal language of context in order to pin down the exact meaning of each thought experiment so one could definitively understand what was being agreed or disagreed with. And formalizing a language for describing the reasons for disagreement likely would be even harder. It feels such a formalization endeavor would mirror some of the early work done in formal logics. Not sure if such an undertaking would be productive, or would most philosophers feel it fails to capture the essence of each thought experiment and their ethical implications?
In any case, it seem interesting but ultimately quite difficult to model ethical philosophy as an observationally-based empirical science that closely parallels the sciences... but maybe it could (productively) be done??
Does this mean if someone is obviously living an exemplary life, with plenty of examples where they deliberately chose to uphold some personal moral code over what was easiest or most convenient, that their views on ethical philosophy are per se more believable?
The making up figures bit is quite quotable, if you ever need to win this debate in the wild.
Interesting perspective. Not disagreeing with it. I just note, what I see as the deeper problem: ethical philosophy is built upon sand.
Unlike physics or chemistry, there are no real objective 'facts' to be had. This is why one simply ignores its conclusions when they seem wrong. One understands the bedrock assumptions themselves are forever up to interpretation, and logically constructed edifices upon such foundations all the more so.
I talked to one of my fellow moral realists about this before deciding to reply. I am familiar with your work as a hostage negotiator because I have made a module for my students on the Shirley A. Allen case in Illinois. Anyway, it's important to remember that the relativism that serves one well in your professional capacity needs to be bracketed away when making claims about normative ethics. Of course you must tell people they're not evil in order to stop them from doing additional evil. I get that. Notions of objectivity would get in your way. However, the side you're on and the side they are on permit no confusion. To tie it back to science, think of how physics relied on the Bohr Model for a long while. It put man on the moon even as it was later proven imperfect. Objectivity is found in ethical models the same way. We can make up thought exercises, engage in dialectic, and then we become objective according to coherence to the frame of reference of the model. Emotivists and relativists get turned in circles because their claims are self-defeating, sprawling, and deny ancient ideas of techne that have stood up to inquiry for thousands of years. It's not the take you want. You can't see ethics anymore than you can see a quark, but both are assuredly there regardless of whether the senses privilege their existence. Disagreement about particulars should not be attributed as evidence of non-existence. Rant over.
Christopher,
Alas I am the Dan Oblinger of lesser-fame than the Hostage Negotiator. I am a PhD from Illinois, and I do know the frustration of having my field of AI attacked by outsiders w/o full understanding of it. So please forgive any ignorance shown here, it is not intentional.
You provide a compelling vision of objectivity in Ethics, one that I had not thought through fully before. Still it seems that this objectivity is not as crisp as it is across most of the sciences.
In the sciences observations must be replicable in order to be accepted, thus in most science there is a very enumerable list of observations that must be accounted for. These are very crisply expressed in language that brook little disagreement regarding whether a given observation is or is not consistent with a given theory.
I am unaware if there are formalized framings of these thought experiments that would allow such unambiguous assessment of their relation to a give ethical model. Also it seems the space of thought experiments is not enumerated in anything those in most sciences. It feels to this outsider that each major ethical model has its bevy of thought experiments that justify that model. And others have their somewhat disjointed thought experiments. Tomorrow yet a new theory could be proposed as long as one could frame thought experiments to justify it, then it could join the pantheon of notable ethical theories. Importantly it would not need to supplant earlier theories in order to do this.
To this outsider it seems different in the sense that in hard sciences, even a SINGLE observation, if reliable enough, is enough to fully debunk a previous theory. Eventually this leads to the rejection of a present theory in favor of a newer one that accounts for ALL prior observations along with the new discordant observation. This does not seem the way ethical philosophy proceeds. Perhaps medical sciences bears some relation here? Because the human body is so complex, and our ability to execute strong experiments is ethically constrained, we often have correlational observations that disagree with a theory, yet we cannot definitively rule the theory out. One must find many such discrepancies to kill a theory. Still, even in medical sciences we do have progress where certain mainstream theories are widely a accepted then later widely rejected on the basis of new evidence. As I understand it ethical philosophy generally does not proceeds in this fashion. (though there is a kind of progress since the questions of today are different than 100 years ago.)
It occurs to me an interesting (and massive) agenda might be to model ethical philosophy more directly as an empirical science. In such a world there would be experimentalists that generally do not focus on theory, but instead look to uncover observations that disagree with existing theory. When found they simply publish the novel observation--which is accepted as a valid and strong advancement of the field. In Ethical Philosophy I guess this would be a kind of psychologist that formulates thought experiments that they believe human subjects would agree with, but that also disagree the widely accepted theories of the day. They would then empirically validate that indeed human subjects indeed react as imagined. This would result in a growing body of consensus thought experimental observations that nearly all human subjects agree with. To really follow this agenda one might need to invent a formal language of context in order to pin down the exact meaning of each thought experiment so one could definitively understand what was being agreed or disagreed with. And formalizing a language for describing the reasons for disagreement likely would be even harder. It feels such a formalization endeavor would mirror some of the early work done in formal logics. Not sure if such an undertaking would be productive, or would most philosophers feel it fails to capture the essence of each thought experiment and their ethical implications?
In any case, it seem interesting but ultimately quite difficult to model ethical philosophy as an observationally-based empirical science that closely parallels the sciences... but maybe it could (productively) be done??
Does this mean if someone is obviously living an exemplary life, with plenty of examples where they deliberately chose to uphold some personal moral code over what was easiest or most convenient, that their views on ethical philosophy are per se more believable?
All else being equal, yes.