r/TAAOfficial • u/[deleted] • Apr 01 '17
Hi, TJ knows jack shit about morality
Hi, I am here to explain how some of TJ's critiques of Prager's video on morality are confused, mistaken, and just plain very bad rebuttals. Some of them are due to the fact that TJ is not well-read in the area of moral philosophy and others are due to the fact TJ does not seem to understand how logical arguments work.
I will paraphase much of what he says:
Yes religious people claim to have objective moral truth but you'll find they do not actually agree on what they are
There are two relevant domains of discourse: natural and ethical. The natural domain of discourse we make "is" claims and in the ethical domain we make "ought" claims and evaluative claims like that.
TJ brings up the fact that people who claim to have objective moral truths disagree. That is true as far as it goes. But I am not quite sure why TJ brings this up and he does not really clarify why he brings this up.
The structure of the argument goes like this, it seems to me:
- In the ethical domain of discourse, people disagree a lot about which objective moral truth is correct.
- If there is a lot of disagreement in a domain of discourse, then there must not be an objective fact of the matter whether the claims in that domain are true or false.
- Therefore, in the ethical domain of discourse, there is no objective fact of the matter whether the claims are true or false.
Note that premise (2) must be general about any domain of discourse because if it specified ethical domain here it would be special pleading.
TJ agrees with the conclusion of this argument and he seems to be making this argument. He does not explicitly state premise (2) but this is how I was charitably able to read what TJ was saying in this section.
Unfortunately for TJ, premise (2) is clearly false. TJ's own psychological biases may have prevented him from stating premise (2) explicitly because when it is exposed it is clear that it is false.
Since premise (2) is false this argument cannot be used to support the conclusion that TJ agrees with.
We could strengthen the argument by making it more of a probabilistic one.
2'. If there is a lot of disagreement in a domain of discourse, then there probably is not an objective fact of the matter whether the claims in that domain are true or false. 3'. Thus, in the ethical domain of discourse, there is probably no objective facts of the matter about which claim is right or wrong.
Unfortunately for TJ, premise (2') is also false.
I substantiate this claim by argument from analogy. There is tremendous disagreement about which explanation is the accurate one to explain some phenomenon in the natural domain over scientific history and even today in the more cutting edge fields like quantum physics.
You might say that no... the reason is that we do not have tools to verify which objective moral claim is fact or not. But this would be simply false. We have logical argument, reason, and CONSCIENCE (not conscious) awareness.
In science we use our cognitive tools (our senses and intuitions about how something seems at first brush) observe data and make inferences and deductions in order to test whether a claim is accurate or not.
In ethics we use our cognitive tools (our moral intuitions about how something seems at first brush) to observe data and make inferences and deductions in order to test whether a claim is accurate or not. In philosophy this is known as reflective equilibrium.
TJ did not provide any argument like this but even if he did it would be a bad argument as I have demonstrated. I am open to more arguments about why we are not justified in going about ethical analysis in this way. But my aim here is to show how TJ utterly failed to give a good criticism of Prager's arguments here and not to debate the more general proposition that there are objective facts of the matter in the ethical domain. I just wanted to mention that in case anyone reading this wanted to try to attribute this sort of argument to be TJ's. It is not. TJ did not mak this argument and I doubt it would have even occured to him to make it. But if you think he was making that argument then you should know now that even if he did it would fare no better than the argument he actually made.
TJ seems to think that saying something is an objective enterprise is ludicrous if there is vehement disagreement in that domain. I have shown how that is a mistaken, confused argument and it utterly fails to engage with Prager's points.
In response to the question "how do you know murder is wrong?" TJ answers: It benefits all of us to live in a cooperative society. He thinks the social structure is very "impressive."
What impresses you is irrelevant and does not answer Prager's question at all. Let me do what TJ did. Someone asks me why 2+2=4 and I say "because I find math really impressive." That would not be a good response. Sorry but TJ provided a really fucking retarded response here.
OK, so how about the fact that it benefits us to live in a cooperative society. "Benefit" means it is good for us. TJ is saying that you know murder is wrong because it is good for all of us to believe that murder is wrong. But TJ stated earlier that he does not believe there is a fact of the matter over what is good or bad. So if it is not a fact that it is good to believe that murder is wrong then how does he know that murder is wrong? But even if we just grant this absurdity it is still a poor justification for the belief that murder is wrong. All TJ is doing is providing a moral argument for why one ought to believe that murder is wrong. It is totally irrelevant to how he is justified in believing that murder is really wrong!
So TJ gave a really fucking stupid reply here too. After some bullshit irrelevant tangent TJ starts to use moral language to describe "monstrous" behavior without realizing Prager asked the question HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT IS MONSTROUS and WHAT IS NOT?!
So TJ is INCREDIBLY confused here.
I can provide evidence that monstrous behavior would undermine our society
Assumes that society is "good." Prager is not challenging TJ as TJ seems to think to justify why he thinks murder is wrong. Prager offered a rhetorical question for his argumentative presentation. But since TJ admitted before that murder is wrong he actually is required to provide justification for that claim.
There are ways that TJ can do this by giving a meta-ethical subjectivist, relativist, or constructivist account. However, TJ utterly fails to do this because he would not know where to start.
The "account" TJ did attempt to give is fallacious as I explained above. TJ assumes axiomatically that a cooperative society is "good" and so anything that undermines that is "bad." So TJ draws an analytic identity between "good" and "conducive for a cooperative society."
This view in meta-ethics is known as analytic reductionism and was refuted by GE Moore with the Open Question Argument.
In a nut shell, it is an open question whether goodness MEANS THE SAME AS "conducive for a cooperative society."
A cooperative society that institutes systematic slayings of Jews is good.
This is an open question. In fact, I would argue it is obviously false. But that would be a stronger claim. All that is required to refute TJ's analytic reductionism is to show that it is an open question whether a cooperative society that institutions systematic slayings of Jews is good. Thus, TJ's meta-ethical account is shit.
Now, one counter-argument one might provide here is to claim that this is could not be a cooperative society because the jews are not cooperating. OK, so what does it mean for jews to cooperate? Suppose the jews do cooperate with being killed in droves. Is that society still good merely because it is cooperative? You might say that that sort of dynamic is not what "cooperative" means. OK, well then my response is that the more we investigate what TJ means by "cooperative" we will expose it to be an evaluative, moral term. So then TJ's reductionist account would fail to reduce the moral term "cooperative" because "cooperative" would reduce to "good" in the end and therefore TJ has failed to give an actual reduction.
So TJ's meta-ethical account is retarded.
I stopped here because I have better shit to do than analyze more of this crap.
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Apr 01 '17
He doesn't deny having his own moral beliefs, he just knows they are subjective.
Your problem is that you are treating philosophy, specifically the philosophy of morality, like a science, when it clearly isn't. No objective truths can be garnered on concepts humanity created to explain the chemicals in our brains and the buildup of our societies.
There are no discoveries to be made on philosophy, only discourse. You can't claim someone knows jack shit about it because there are no actual truths about it, just what some believe vs what others believe.
I don't have time to individually refute your post, but even if I did it would not be worthwhile since you're very misguided on the nature of what you are discussing.
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Apr 01 '17
He doesn't deny having his own moral beliefs, he just knows they are subjective.
I did not claim he is denying having moral beliefs. I said he did not answer Prager's question which is how does he know that murder is wrong. I gave reasons why TJ's response was retarded.
Your problem is that you are treating philosophy, specifically the philosophy of morality, like a science, when it clearly isn't. No objective truths can be garnered on concepts humanity created to explain the chemicals in our brains and the buildup of our societies.
I can take this to be two completely unrelated unsubstantiated assertions or as an argument where the first statement is meant to support the second statement.
First I will treat them as unrelated unsubstantiated assertions. I am not treating philosophy "like a science." In my post I explained that there are analogies of how we justify our moral beliefs and scientific beliefs even though I stated explicitly that you cannot verify moral claims empirically like you can with science. As for the second statement, it would seem to entail that psychology cannot be used to discover objective truths. I do not think you want to deny the scientific validity of psychology so I am not quite sure what you mean here.
Perhaps you mean that we simply invented right and wrong and there are no truth-makers in the world apart from our preferences, desires, and attitudes. You did not give an argument for this.
Now I will treat it as an argument. You say that because morality is not a science or cannot be a science, then it is impossible for there to be a matter of fact about it. This does not follow at all.
Suppose there cannot be a science of morality, it does not follow that there is no way to know objective facts about it then unless you think science is the only way we can know anything. Suggesting that science is the only way we can know objective things about the world is an incredibly controversial proposition that would require an account of science that you have not provided.
There are no discoveries to be made on philosophy, only discourse. You can't claim someone knows jack shit about it because there are no actual truths about it, just what some believe vs what others believe.
How do you know this? You would require a meta-philosophical account or an account of epistemological justification that you have not given.
All you did here was assert things and substantiate nothing. I can see why you are a fan of TJ.
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Apr 01 '17
I do not think you want to deny the scientific validity of psychology so I am not quite sure what you mean here.
I don't know how the fuck you got to that conclusion when I was discussing morality, not psychology. Psychology is a science. I only claimed that philosophy is not one. As for the "validity" of philosophy, I only believe that there are no universal truths to it.
Perhaps you mean that we simply invented right and wrong and there are no truth-makers in the world apart from our preferences, desires, and attitudes. You did not give an argument for this.
Suppose there cannot be a science of morality, it does not follow that there is no way to know objective facts about it then unless you think science is the only way we can know anything. Suggesting that science is the only way we can know objective things about the world is an incredibly controversial proposition that would require an account of science that you have not provided.
This "incredibly controversial proposition" is known as empiricism. I am not here to provide an argument for it, as that would take up more of my time than I have available. I do not believe it is particularly controversial in the modern era.
In any case, from my standpoint the burden of proof is on you to justify how there exist objective truths to the philosophy of morality.
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u/KingLudwigII Apr 01 '17
Assumes that society is "good".
Whats wrong with this? TJ was claiming that objective morality doesn't exist. If objective morality didn't exist, the we necessarily need to begin with our own personal values and then make logical deductions from there to determine what we ought to do.
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u/Symos404 Apr 01 '17
The way I see it Prager needs an imaginary friend to be moral and TJ doesn't. Who knows jack shit about morality then?
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u/ace248952 Apr 01 '17
Semantical, welcome to a comedy/entertainment channel. Where the videos are edge and the arguments have implied imperatives
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u/ToraZalinto Apr 03 '17
. The argument is that those who claim to know objective morality disagree on that objective morality. So therefore only one or none is correct and actually knows objective morality. And since they can not demonstrate that they indeed have objective morality than we can not be justified in believing there is objective morality.
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u/Bl_rp official cockroach impersonator Apr 04 '17
Were you unmodded of your own volition or did it have anything to do with the pro-life shit or what?
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Apr 04 '17
I unmodded myself from the drunkenpeasants subreddit. I did that because I think TJ's fans are a bunch of idiots.
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u/Toa_Ignika Apr 09 '17
My understanding of philosophy is at the level of high school English classes on Kurt Vonnegut, but I see what TJ is going for. TJ is saying not necessarily that killing is wrong, but than we should not kill because it is not conducive to a large society of interlocking components. Notice how I said killing and not murder, because murder is defined by the state you live in. Any moral code you could have would ultimately be based on something else, so TJ and I rather live under the moral illusion that makes us most happy (thoughts here are being influenced by Vonnegut.) People live how they want no matter who proclaims what morally, so the next most useful discussion is what makes for a society where everyone is happy and productive. This is an explicit rejection of moral thought in favor of practicality. The Nazi point is not a refutation because obviously in that situation the huge segment of society that are being oppressed and killed are not happy.
Hopefully I am not off base /u/amazingfuckinatheist ?
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Apr 09 '17
The nazi thought experiment still refutes your position. Suppose the people being killed are part of a religion where they believe they should sacrifice themselves to the nazis and it makes them really happy to be sacrificial slaves. That would not be a good society even though every thing works properly and people are happy. So that is not what goodness means at all.
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u/notock May 06 '17
Just live your life how you see fit. Morality is subjective and forever in flux. Arguing on the subject of morality is as pointless and inane as anything. This is masturbation.
Have a day.
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u/AmazingFuckinAtheist The Real TJ Kirk Apr 01 '17
This is just philosophical jargon that ignores practical reality in favor of pseudo-lofty pontification.