When you think about it though, we kind of know that e.g. the founders of the U.S. had some sort of guilty conscience going on with regards to slavery. So we have folks like Washington freeing the slaves in his will, which of course his wife walked back on, and he probably had an idea that she might do that too.
And yet people are able to jump through mental hoops to justify it anyway. We tell ourselves, well it was okay during their time. They probably said the same thing to themselves too. One day I’m sure our ancestors will curse us for bringing about the environmental disaster that was the end of days.
From where did that secret sense of guilt come?
Maybe there was no sense of guilt at all and it was all performative, cynically done for the sake of his reputation. But perhaps the arguments from contemporary abolitionists were secretly eating away at him from the inside, inspiring a real sense of guilt. I think that is congruent with the theory that some small kernel of universal morality exists in all humans capable of feeling empathy, derived from that innate empathy instinct. People can be conditioned to ignore it, and this explains much of the variability in human morality across cultures. A slave owner can ignore that part of his mind that empathizes with the slaves because ignoring it is socially and financially convenient. Some can be needled and prodded into acknowledging it, while many go their entire lives with this empathy buried and ignored. But however ignored, that kernel of universal morality still exists in them. It's universal to humans because we're all the same species of social ape evolved to have instincts which facilitate social cooperation, particularly empathy. This morality is universal in the sense that all humans have the theoretical ability to access it within themselves, but actually doing so obviously isn't universal.
(Actual psychopaths, if such people even exist, may be the exception. If they truly lack the ability to empathize they would be unable to tap into this otherwise universal morality. Furthermore, the empathy instinct is not as perfect as might be wished; in almost all people empathy is felt more strongly for people who are close (socially and geographically.) Less empathy is felt for people who are distant or "other". Innate empathy has limits, and therefore universal morality is woefully flawed and incomplete.)
This overlaps with the quest for AI we have and Chinese Room arguments. We can't even argue that people have the same sense of guilt. Is guilt in some people performative for social gains? Do other people feel guilty on things that at least to me make no sense?
What I say is that everybody (excepting the possibility of true psychopaths) has empathy available to them but many people suppress it. It's a universal ability, but not universally put into practice.
> a path to complete failure in my eyes.
And I dispute complete failure. Humanity does not behave perfectly morally, so if that's your expectation then we've failed and always will fail. But most people do have the capacity to behave morally most of the time, and people are guided in this primarily by their internal sense of right and wrong (informed by their innate social instincts.) This system doesn't work perfectly but it's very far from a complete failure.
> Chomsky seems to be saying that since we learn the prevalent language of our culture through sparse data there must be an underlying universal language structure. But how does that allow for the fact that different languages do have different grammars and that those do change over time?
https://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/so-much-for-chomsky...
> It’s been noticed that children rarely learn a new pattern that’s demonstrated in front of them, which has been taken as meaning that they don’t imitate adult speech. But now we see that they don’t do it because a single instance isn’t enough data for them. They don’t venture to use a new construction till they’ve heard it many times and know how to use it.
> A nice confirmation of this: children learning inflectional languages don’t learn the six person/number combinations at the same rate. They first master the ones with the highest frequency in adult speech– e.g. 1st person singular, rather than 3rd person plural. Again, they’re learning by imitation, and it takes a huge amount of repetition for them to learn something. They also seem to learn each verb paradigm separately– it takes a long time before they start generalizing.
As he adjusts to his new situation, his behavior changes. The moral code of rural Oaxaca is different them that of east LA. His moral code changes. Perhaps he always gave a great amount of help when needed to neighbors in rural Oaxaca, but stops doing that as much. This changes. In Oaxaca, he did not steal from his friends, nor does he in LA. This does not change.
It's obvious even in US culture. Two students go to Harvard, one goes into engineering, one diplomacy. What group are the moral traits of candor, frankness and directness valued? What group are the moral values of politeness and courteousness valued? Morality can be relative, depending on the situation. But for some situations it is not, the more universal things.
“You believe stealing is wrong, but if your family was starving and could not afford bread, wouldn’t you say it’s okay to steal a loaf to feed them?” - A.J. Darkholme
etc.
The basis of a morality may start with a simple set of propositions. Life ensures that the unknown unknowns that you encounter morphs them into an ever-evolving ruleset.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_property#Personal_ver...
Even communal property may be stolen if there are any sort of expectations about one person having temporary exclusive use of that item. Maybe you and I live in a cult compound where literally everything is communally owned, even the cult robes on our backs. Now suppose that when you step into the shower, I take the robe you were wearing, the clean robe you were planning to wear, and all the communally owned towels as well. I have violated your reasonable expectation to have temporary use of those communal items. I have therefore stolen from you. Maybe our cult has a different word for it, but fundamentally I have stolen from you because I've deprived you of something you had a reasonable expectation to possess.
Like how it's OK to prank a friend, but not a stranger - but the friend doesn't actually want to be pranked (i.e. the friend does not want to be stolen from).
It is easy to imagine contexts in which taking something from your friend is morally permissible, because in that context you know the other person won't mind that you've done so. But because they don't mind, it's no longer stealing. Taking becomes stealing when you should reasonably expect the other person to feel hurt by the taking. Hurtfully taking things from your friends is universally immoral in all cultures, but different cultures have different expectations and standards for what kind of taking causes hurt feelings.
What is stealing if I can push a button and said object can be easily duplicated?
Does pain exist if I can turn if off an the level of my brain? Is death horrible if I can reconstitute myself from a backup?
The idea of a universal set of morals, and that humanity could even come close to finding them at our point in development is just not something I believe in happening. We are enslaved to our emotions and bound to our physical meat.
1) That while it's possible to talk about moral relativism in the abstract, nobody in their own life is a complete moral relativist, which is to say that they will have _some_ moral system that they live their life by, even if they completely recognize the arbitrariness of it.
2) Moral systems have large degrees of freedom, but they _are_ constrained, and he thinks some of those constraints might be innate. For example, while all forms of violence can be approved of in some society, it's always _conditional_. You could _imagine_ a moral system where arbitrary extreme violence against anyone and anything including yourself and your family would be perfectly moral, but you won't see that in any real society. There are always some conditions under which violence is acceptable.
The existence of a tether is what he’s focused on here, it seems to me.
Say there's are a pair of cultures, each celebrating a celestial event like Equinox or Solstice. In culture A, the tradition is that at solstice you should wear red shirts. Suppose they're not extreme about it, but they may look at you concerned or disappointed that you're not respecting their tradition for wearing a red shirt on that day. In culture B, the tradition is to wear a blue shirt instead.
If you go to culture B (from culture A), and wear a red shirt at the day, people will find it strange and be disappointed.
Does that mean one of those cultures is right in an absolute sense, and the other is wrong? I think at least in a "good enough" sense, maybe not. I think in many cases it comes down to non-unique solutions -- more than one culture can be good. Either case may be fine.
However, I think we can with progress in philosophy, science, etc.. critique cultures as a whole: we can try to define what is good. Not only that, but I think in the sense of what is good, then yes: I think we should converge on common, more or less universal principles. Within the same principles, a universe of cultures can exist; furthermore, variety itself is arguably part of goodness. If everything is the same, then we might be missing out in serious ways, both in immediately practical terms of different viewpoints fostering new innovations (if everyone thinks exactly the same... everyone has mostly the same ideas), and also in a cultural, aesthetic sense of life being more interesting with more than one 'cultural way', so to speak. Yet cultures should mostly agree on common universal principles (at least in some 'assymptotic', aspirational sense -- principles should be agreed more and more, and disagreements ought to become more minor).
You may observe 'Ok, but those principles are just the product of the culture you started with!'. I think that's somewhat fair. But I think universal principles are kind of 'natural' in a certain sense -- I think there is a unique set of principles that is capable of unifying concepts like science, truth, morality, sustainability, art, culture -- as far as reason can go. If you look at mathematics, it is universally agreed whether a statement should be true or not. And we don't expect a different culture to find it differently. It's really surprising, I think, that reason should be able to tell anything about culture, but, although it's in some senses extremely difficult (specially if you're thinking of proving anything practical/concrete, like whether an art piece is beautiful or not), those things should all be accessible to reason. This is in no small part because the processes that happen in our own minds can be studied -- and the study of mental processes is in the end what can provide a great unification of all sciences and arts (although in practice like I said it's too difficult in the near term). We can understand the nature of happiness, unhappiness, beauty, motivation, and so on, in a very solid way, in the same way we can study the behaviors of particles, control systems, processors, materials, knots, and so on (there are some important details to this study that are too long for this discussion[1]).
(I think both Chomsky and Focault would probably agree on this point eventually)
That's not to say you can't have cultures that refuse all that, potentially until they 'die'. It's also not to say you couldn't have some weird culture that does mathematics in a different way and they try to persistently live with grave inconsistencies. This would make their mathematics fragile, and probably far less useful -- the point where we call it 'totally unreasonable, pointless'. But it doesn't seem impossible that they could be totally unreasonable. This seems to undermine the notion of universality. If universality doesn't mean all cultures share the values, not even that all cultures would converge or even agree on those values, what could it mean? I think universality only means (in the context of ethics) that a culture with a sufficient set of tools/principles, procedures and systems do eventually converge on common principles. It's basically a basin of attraction of principles (and practices), that needs a minimal set for bootstrapping.
So what is this minimal set? And critically, do we even have it?
I think it can be summarized as consistency, or truth. By requiring that language be logically consistent, and enforcing the notion of truth (across reason[2], individual and collective decision-making), plus of course being sentient beings ourselves (that allow us to recognize and understand truths related to sentience, which I think are at the root of all that matters[3]), we get science, we become able to talk with each other reasonably, we become able to agree, we become able to investigate, etc.. By demanding that ethical principles have some (and eventually rigorous) consistency, we can get to moral truths: if my (literal) brother and my neighbors are both human beings, why should I only help my brother and not my neighbor? How am I fundamentally different from others that I should be more important? (egotism), etc.. What makes it hard, fundamentally, is that sometimes those demands come into conflict with our instincts, or even major aspects of our society, so we can dangerously veer off this path.
I think we have it, and another name for it might be Enlightenment, both in the sense of western culture, and eastern cultures (e.g. in buddhism). Are we enlightened yet? :)
(I would say we're mostly on the path to enlightenment, although we haven't yet been able to discover and agree on some principles and truths that are very important to our lives -- we are on the path but still far from the ideals)
This is such a beautiful and important notion to me, I think it might be worth it to call this God (i.e. this enlightenement, this path to truth/science/everything that is good that can be known) -- with capital G, and why not worship and protect this notion.
[1] The difference is that you need sentient beings and our experiences of ourselves to be able to understand truths about sentience. In a way we are, and have to be, both subject and scientist, and this is a little different from strict views of science.
[2] I've talked so much about reason/truth that I think I should mention intuition too. Intuition is the practical means of thought. Intuition can be thought as large leaps of logic that may be uncertain and/or non-trivial. Most of our language statements don't actually follow from one another immediately in the sense of logic, instead they tend to jump many steps at once, or we even make propositions that are unproven (in mathematics we tend to use intuitive leaps to find proofs and then fill in the gaps with formal statements). Many things in life are actually not so important that we need to prove an ideal solution, usually good enough is enough. Still, this process and language itself relies on the infrastructure of logic, truth and consistency to work; and in many cases, involving important decisions, we can reduce uncertainty and improve decisions by refining our steps, and giving more solid arguments (approaching truth with greater confidence).
[3] Just to be clear, I'm far from proposing we become naive logical machines. Those would probably be both ineffective, and neglect taking into account the experience of being itself. Even fantasy is important in this sense, but I think we should be careful to keep fantasy separate from reality as much as reasonable (phenomena like 'Santa Claus' and psychological quirks notwithstanding). Fantasy is good and reasonable in a way! Same goes for things like arts, games, sports, leisure. Should be made from self-sustainable good feelings.