Commitment to solving problems entails a commitment to knowledge growth, which in turn involves a commitment to certain values, such as valuing truth and being open to error-correction by debating and criticizing ideas. Killing and enslaving people is the opposite of this.
What do you mean by "problems"? And whose problems? My solution might be the source of your problem, and why should I care if it is?
In David Deutsch's terminology, a problem exists when a conflict between ideas is experienced. It is worth reading his books to understand more on his view. He builds on Karl Popper's work, which is also worth reading.
> And whose problems?
Everyone has their own particular problem situation. Here's some relevant things Popper has said about problems and solving them:
> All things living are in search of a better world. Men, animals, plants, even unicellular organisms are constantly active. They are trying to improve their situation, or at least to avoid its deterioration... Every organism is constantly preoccupied with the task of solving problems. These problems arise from its own assessments of its condition and of its environment; conditions which the organism seeks to improve... We can see that life — even at the level of the unicellular organism — brings something completely new into the world, something that did not previously exist: problems and active attempts to solve them; assessments, values; trial and error.
And lastly
> My solution might be the source of your problem, and why should I care if it is?
How to 'make you care' about you creating a problem for me is itself a problem that we can create knowledge to solve, perhaps e.g. by creating a legal system that discourages you from doing the thing that made my life worse.
>> My solution might be the source of your problem, and why should I care if it is?
> How to 'make you care' about you creating a problem for me is itself a problem that we can create knowledge to solve, perhaps e.g. by creating a legal system that discourages you from doing the thing that made my life worse.
I think your use of "we" presumes some value of universalist cooperation (I'm no philosopher, so I'm just throwing around words to express what I'm feeling), which I don't think can be assumed. I think the more accurate statement is: "how to 'make you care' about you creating a problem for me" is a problem for you.
My gut feel is the only way to really to prioritize concern for others is a moral framework that says so (and offers a compelling reason to follow it), or some kind of finely-balanced anarchy where no person or group really has the power or opportunity to force problems on others (which seems impossible to maintain in practice).
Also another reason I think I can't agree that "solving problems = good" is there once was a problem labeled "the Jewish Problem" and the "final" solution to it is literally the epitome of evil.
Popper’s grandparents were Jewish and he wrote one of his major works which explores these topics, The Open Society and Its Enemies, as an urgent response to the totalitarian ideologies and atrocities of WWII. Totalitarian ideologies do not permit open, critical pursuit of the truth, and so they cannot create knowledge to solve problems in an unbounded way. Free, open societies can, where ideas can be freely exchanged and people have the freedom to criticise institutions without fear of violence. The values of an open society are the values needed for knowledge growth. And the reason we want more knowledge is to solve our problems.
I am wondering if it would have been better if I had written ‘solving problems is on balance a good thing’? Or do you think solving problems is on balance bad, or perhaps neutral?
I don't think the "solving problems" angle escapes subjectivity. It seems like just obscured subjectivity.
There is objective truth about the physical world, and we work towards it by error-correcting and replacing our bad explanations with better explanations. Errors and bad explanations cause us problems, and we create knowledge to solve them.
Moral problems like the holocaust also require knowledge to solve. With more knowledge, we could have stopped the holocaust sooner. We can't just embrace ignorance and unreason and hope for the best, we need to create a continuous stream of knowledge to solve the continuous stream of problems we face.
You can't just commit to any subjective moral values you feel like and hope to have continual success in knowledge creation. Unbounded knowledge creation requires commitment to moral values such as tolerance, openness to criticism and change, and respect for truth. Blind obedience to authority, rigid acceptance of dogma and commitment to infallible final solutions are all morally bad and limit our ability to make continual progress.
The only way to solve problems is to create knowledge. We need to create good explanations of what is there, what it does, and how and why. The only we know to create knowledge is through creatively guessing things and checking our ideas against criticism.
To solve the moral problem of whether breeding and killing animals to eat is wrong we need a good explanation of consciousness, and whether animals are conscious, and if they suffer. We do not have a good explanation of consciousness or suffering yet. Any ideas we do have we can improve upon, endlessly.
Edit: I should emphasize that we can never be certain that we've really 'solved' any given problem: we could always be wrong. This is why we should always be open to criticism and better ideas.
Not necessarily universally: one can have a philosophy / worldview where dealing with your problems is a way to spiritual enlightenment and getting rid of the problems / suffering prevents you from achieving higher spiritual / intellectual levels.
> Gnostic cosmogony generally presents a distinction between a supreme, hidden God and a malevolent lesser divinity (sometimes associated with the God of the Hebrew Bible)[1] who is responsible for creating the material universe. Consequently, Gnostics considered material existence flawed or evil […]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
Any worldview (Buddhism? Hinduism? that treats the material world as 'bad(-sh)' or an illusion would be 'susceptible' to this line of thinking.
Appeals to the supernatural or dogma are bad explanations, and they should be criticised and improved upon. They are bad explanations because they are not hard to vary, and can be easily modified or replaced by any other supernatural or dogmatic entity or force without affecting the phenomenon they are supposed to explain. They are essentially arbitrary and unfalsifiable assertions that do not increase our understanding of reality.
Also note, you never get rid of problems, there are always more. New knowledge creates new and better problems. Running out of problems would itself be a problem.
Your very sentence implies a universal moral code. You are calling murder, slavery, and genocide wrong. By which standard do you know them to be wrong? Such a standard must necessarily exist outside of the groups that glorifies the things you correctly call abominations.
Edit: typos
Those groups would also call us wrong. If groups of humans tend to display very different and incompatible moral codes, that's a strong argument against a universal morality. Another argument against it is that most people in groups that glorified what terrifies us lived and died without showing an ounce of remorse for their actions.
> Your very sentence implies a universal moral code. You are calling murder, slavery, and genocide wrong.
Not at all. I used those examples because I know that most contemporary readers would agree. The fact that there is no universal moral code does not mean we can't have a moral code.
Wouldn't they then also be appealing to a universal moral code in order to call us wrong? If there is no universal moral code, nobody gets to call anybody else wrong (in the moral sense) at all.
We are rightfully condemning chattel slavery. However we can't do that if we are not appealing to a universal moral standard. We have no right to claim that the Southern states were wrong, if slavery in the way existed back then wasn't universally wrong.
This also applies to all the other examples people are giving in reply to my comment. People doing things that we consider to be morally wrong does not imply that there is no code. It merely implies that one of us is wrong.
> If groups of humans tend to display very different and incompatible moral codes, that's a strong argument against a universal morality.
I don't think is is a strong argument at all. People are wrong about things all the time. If a whole civilization of people consider earth to be flat, and a whole other civilization considers it to be round, it doesn't follow that earth has no shape at all. It follows that one of them are wrong.
> Not at all. I used those examples because I know that most contemporary readers would agree.
Fair enough. I misunderstood you. I didn't mean to strawman your argument.
I really don't understand why you think there is a need for a universal moral truth in order to have a self-consistent moral code. We didn't believe that every human being has certain rights, which is why our ancestors did not perceive chattel slavery as immoral. We now do, and the actions of our ancestors are appalling to our modern perspective, but we cannot at all believe that this means we are "right" and they are "wrong" by appealing to a universal moral code. We can point out that certain moral codes lead to better outcomes (golden rule and all that), we can reason that society is better off enforcing stricter moral standards and we can build societies that enshrine some of these moral rules as laws, all without a universal morality existing at all.
The comparison to physics does not help here. Morality is entirely dependent on a set of subjective beliefs, such as the one I mentioned above about human rights. Physics is not. The world is either flat or it isn't, but two different groups of humans can have diametrically opposed beliefs about, say, veganism and neither of them is necessarily wrong.
What are the conditions for a universal morality?
Of course it can be applied. We know that those states and governments are wrong by the universal moral code condemning murder, slavery and genocide. We would have no grounds to condemn these things, if it wasn't for a universal moral code.
I can support legalized murder and condemn everyone who doesn't, therefore creating the grounds to condemn anything else.
Some religions practice human sacrifice, including of children.[1]
My opinion is we're better off arguing there's a better moral code based on a number of arbitrary parameters (freedom, resource creation, comfort, longevity, equality, merit, envy management, violence management, respect for tradition, respect of minorities, etc). I can't see how you can declare a universal code of conduct, I can see how you can declare a technocratic liberal one.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cul...
I am saying that if we are too say the Ancient Mesopotamians was wrong for sacrificing their children, we have to appeal to some kind of universal standard outside of them to do that. This logic also applies to the Aztec human sacrifice, and to the way the Nazi's treated the Jews. We need a universal standard to say they were wrong.
To make this more actual: You are advocating for a technocratic liberal moral code. Many people are advocating for a historic Christian moral code. How would you even start debating the Christians without appealing to a universal morality? You'll have to assert that your moral code is universal. If you don't, you have no basis to require other people to behave according to your morality.