Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged? If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity? If it’s not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn’t benefit you over others?

moral relativism has really easy and good answers to all of these questions

how can we be outraged if we can't be sure god is outraged with us

'how can we' uh how you been doin it all this time yo

Yeah, but he means 'how can we rationally,' right?

It is funny that he thinks some K-12 reading comprehension exercises are the main thing driving relativism.

People who complain about "moral relativism" are virtually always too simple-minded (or cynical) to actually apply their supposed moral universalism evenhandedly.

of course jmm but for some reason how can wes always leave out the fantasy about having unshakable grounding for every judgment we make when they get to saying 'how can we', which makes for a fairly different speech act in the practical context of moral alarm i suspect

xp isn't it possible to be hypocritical about your own moral universalism and still condemn a moral relativism totality?

how can we dance when our earth is turning how can we sleep while our beds are burning

The blank stare on his face said it all.

It doesn't seem like moral relativism is the real target in that article. It comes up in passing, and it's clear he doesn't care for it, but the real beef is with the view that there are no moral facts at all. Relativists, as I understand it, tend to think there are moral facts, or at least moral truths of a sort.

huh? moral relativism is the view that different people/cultures will inevitably have different views regarding moral truth (and everything else). it seems predicated on the the idea that so-called "moral truths" are social constructs, local preferences, thus not factual in any universal sense.

author is a complete dork though:

When I went to visit my son's second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and googled "fact vs. opinion". The definitions I found online were substantially the same as the ones I found in my son's classroom.

Handy metaethics chart (big image)

This one puts relativism as a species of moral realism: there is moral truth but it depends on our beliefs. That's basically how I understand relativism. It's different from anti-realism in that we retain the idea of there being moral truths and facts, but these vary with respect to culture.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/

Do negative qualities have an apex or a nadir? Could something be, say, the apex of tediousness?

Oh, no reason. Just wondering.

abyss looks into u

I'm not sure Danish even have words for 'moral truths' and 'moral facts'. There might just be moral right and wrong.

How about like universally ethical v culturally mediated?

I sort of get the author's discomfort on some of those points, but I still think the idea of "moral FACTS" is awkward at best. "Killing is wrong," is, in the most literal sense, not a "fact" even if it is "true." Moral truths is maybe a better term. Seems more like some of those Q's should have been avoided altogether, as they could be confusing or ambiguous.

First, the definition of a fact waffles between truth and proof — two obviously different features. Things can be true even if no one can prove them. For example, it could be true that there is life elsewhere in the universe even though no one can prove it. Conversely, many of the things we once “proved” turned out to be false. For example, many people once thought that the earth was flat. It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives). Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative. Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t. In that case, E=MC2 is a fact for a physicist but not for me.

this shit is so numbskulled I am filled with rage

There's a kinda analogue in Judaism- things we'd know are wrong without God (murder, theft, etc) and things we wouldn't (keeping the sabbath holy).

I thought the author gave perfectly fine reasons to think those definitions of "fact" and "opinion" are not very good.

Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t. In that case, E=MC2 is a fact for a physicist but not for me.

this is not how the scientific method works you goddamned moron

(not directed at you JRN)

I don't think his point there depends on any view about the scientific method. Maybe it's a bad example (the flat earth thing is definitely a bad example), but the basic idea is clear: it doesn't make much sense to have fact-status depend on whether the truth in question can be proven.

what we can determine to be fact is limited by our perceptions - he seems to get tripped up by this. But facts that we can't prove aren't facts, we have no way of verifying them. They're speculation until they can be proven. We discover new facts when we can prove something we haven't been able to prove before.

There is an ocean of difference between "can be proven" and "I could personally write the proof"

He's being lazy about the scope of "can be proven," as though defining facts in terms of possibility of proof means possibility of proof for particular people, so that facts are relative to who can prove them. Maybe a decent definition of a fact is that proving it is logically possible.

I feel like if you don't have this down, you shouldn't really get to call yourself a "philosopher"

The general thrust of his argument hinges on accepting that facts exist independently of humans and our perceptions, intellectual constructs, limits, etc. But they literally don't. Facts are social, human constructs - they are a term describing phenomenon that we perceive. They are not objects in some kind of absolute reality that exists independent of human perceptions.

I don't know. It seems like the universe was obeying certain laws long before any humans were around to notice it

that's what our observations tell us.

but no us = no observations = no facts

our understanding of phenomena is certainly a human construct, but we are not creating cosmic events from a few billion years ago by finding out about them now with our instruments

calling something a fact is a way to describe something we observe, including something that we can determine as having happened in the past. But prior to our observation, whatever happened a billion years ago was not a "fact" - it was something that existed outside of human perception.

an unknown unknown

haha yes

so what's a better word for such a thing than "fact", an "actuality"?

an actually

fucks sake

I think it's enough to be clear that calling something a fact is not a way to describe some kind of ultimate reality that exists beyond human perceptions. Once you get into things we can't observe you're getting into the territory of mysticism, speculation, hypotheses etc. Facts describe what we know, and they change over time as our base of knowledge, our catalog of observations expands (or, regrettably, contracts).

xp

i don't have the patience to read that stupid article but this seems like a silly conversation, 'fact' and 'opinion' are obviously devices introduced to children as part of their indoctrination into the american system of compromise between living in the reality-based community and respecting the right of other people to believe stupid shit by declaring that all such belief exists in a realm of liberty impenetrable to facts, all they learn is which sorts of things their teachers prod them with are to elicit 'fact' or 'opinion' categorizations, and if things go well over time they learn to replace those with more sophisticated replacements

man this revive is heady, from kantian ethics to phenomenology to cosmology to pedagogy in a couple of posts!

thats a fact

an actually my dear

And then there's quantum mechanics.

Of course, the meaning of the word 'fact' is a social construct, so there's nothing wrong with defining it as describing 'phenomenon that we perceive'. However, it's anthropocentric to define facts only through human perception, and there's also the fact of the matter that we aren't just 'observing' the world, we are in the world, of the world, and as quantum mechanics tells us, our observations impact the world. And we don't simply observe the world, we use the world itself to observe it. 'Facts' are created not just through social relations, but are instead constantly recreated through complex intrarelations of subject, apparatus and object.

The best book I've read on this question is Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway. At the end of that book, she defines 'understanding' as reacting to a difference. In that way, the plants 'understands' the shadows when they refuse to grow in them. Uhm, and so on. I should reread it soon, I think.

The whole thing shows the bankruptcy of cartesian dualism, iirc.

These are all nice points, but "Is it a fact if you can prove it but I can't?" is just like bad high school stoner sophistry AFAICT.

Prove that Tool rocks. Show your work.

i agree
w frederik b
basically

my wittgenstein is from freshman year and probably appropriately shallow, but doesn't he talk in on certainty about people's attitude towards their "bedrock" beliefs, beliefs they cannot sanely doubt (not just moral precepts like no-killing but the kind of empirical observations descartes claims to doubt--there is a floor beneath my feet, there is no demon in my head, my senses are reporting on a real world that also exists for others etc)? says iirc that these beliefs vary from person to person and culture to culture and cannot be meaningfully rated against each other BUT ALSO that it would be absurd to act as if your personal set of them were not reliable--that you should act in accordance with what you perceive to be fundamental truths, while remembering that you have no way of knowing if they are. seems to me that this is the complicated way in which mature 20/21c-ers are obligated to live, and also that lots of people do live this way--they act from conviction without necessarily being sure the universe is with them. (that this is "rationally" "impossible" proves nothing but the limits of rationality in understanding human behavior+ability.) the nyt article seems to think that the only alternative to belief in the objective truth of your moral system is helpless stasis: that if you teach kids they could be wrong about things that seem clear to them, or that circumstances might transform apparent Goodness into Badness, they will be paralyzed for life. those ideas certainly do make moral decision-making trickier and less comfortable! but that's because moral decision-making is tricky and uncomfortable (especially after the scorecard racked up by its most confident practitioners), not because lacan or derrida or the simpsons or your snarky teenage son made it that way. people have been wishing this difficulty away forever and they have always blamed its most recent set of messengers for creating it, and always in the same way: they corrupt the youth. prepare the hemlock.

speaking of the youth tho, i am relieved to read that recent reports about their terrifying dogmatism and militantly illiberal disrespect for white men's opinions have been exaggerated, that the kids are still a bunch of amoral blank-faced slackers with no convictions, and that liberalism is still going Too Far after all. maybe we can bring pogs and tech decks back too.

(extremely insecure in this company abt the wittgenstein part of that post but it gets better halfway thru prob)