Thoughts on “Leprechaun: Back 2 Tha Hood”

So, the last Leprechaun movie was an ill-conceived combination of urban drama and ridiculous back comedy horror. Given this, it is of course obvious that the next movie should … directly attempt the same sort of thing again, only with much less interesting characters and underlying urban drama plot.

This movie follows a couple of women and the on-again, off-again boyfriend of one of them as she attempts to achieve her dream of becoming a hairdresser, I guess, and maybe go to college? At least, she wants to escape the hood. They eventually find the leprechaun’s treasure and set out to start using it for what they want, while the leprechaun, as usual, tries to kill them to recover it. That’s pretty much it.

The problem is that none of the characters are all that interesting or well-developed. The main lead is supposedly the person we are to sympathize with, but her dreams are rather uninspired and she doesn’t even seem like someone who works hard and has had life and luck go against her. She gets chided in the beauty salon where she works for not doing the right job, and while it’s clear from the structure of the scene that we’re supposed to think that the criticism is unfair from how it actually works out there’s no reason to think that the complaints of her boss and the customer aren’t valid. She doesn’t seem particularly motivated or competent and the movie doesn’t take the time to establish that her boss and/or customer have it in for her. This essentially makes her a cutout character that we simply watch try to avoid getting killed for an entire movie.

Her boyfriend — the other character to survive the movie — is even worse. We start out with what could have been good, with him being challenged by and somewhat challenging a gang on the streets. But the first time he links up with the group, we are told in no uncertain terms that he isn’t very good and has in some way treated the main female character badly. This could have worked if he had had an epiphany or revelation and ended up a better person by the end, but he’s neither intelligent nor good throughout the movie and never manages any kind of redemption at the end of it. So at the beginning we get the impression that the main female character would be better off without him and would have to seem like a doormat if she went with him, and at the end that impression is unchanged, which makes it rather unappealing that the two of them end up together.

Since the movie only has the bare semblance of a plot and the horror scenes are rather unimpressive, all we have is the character dynamics to fall back on, but unlike in the previous movie those are utterly uninteresting here. In the previous movie, you could have imagined a good horror movie or good movie using that premise if they hadn’t shoehorned the leprechaun into the movie, but here there’s really nothing of interest at all. To make this movie interesting, they would have had to toss pretty much everything out and start over, which is not a good sign for the movie.

As you might expect, I didn’t care for this movie and have no intention of ever watching it again.

First Thoughts on “Saint’s Row the Third”

In looking for a game to play in my fleeting spare time, there were a few considerations. One of the biggest ones was that because I’ve been working from home for the past month or so, I didn’t want to play a PC game. I was already spending 9 or 10 hours sitting at my desk for work, and wanted to at least have the hope of getting out of that room and sitting somewhere else for the few hours that I would be away from work. That meant that playing some of the 200+ GOG games I have in my library wasn’t going to be a live option, or at least it wasn’t going to be a regular option. It also meant, however, that I was going to be doing my gaming on either my comfy couch or comfy chair, as it meant that I was going to be playing console or Vita games, or perhaps the classic game console games that I’ve also wanted to play for quite some time.

Another consideration was that I needed a game that I could play for both an hour or so or a couple of hours. Most of my RPGs were not of that sort, and most of the fighting game and visual novel games were not of that sort either. The former tended to be ones that I couldn’t play for a short run, while the latter were games that I couldn’t play for a long time. The classic console games could work for that, and a few other games, but that requirement did leave a rather short list of things to play. Still, I dug through my PS3 and PS4 games and came up with a stack of games that could work for that, either on their own or in combination. And one of them that came up, as you can tell from the title, was “Saint’s Row the Third”.

One of my first impressions is that the game can indeed work as per my criteria, or at least it could at first. The big thing I did when first playing the game was pretty much just drive around and buy properties, doing gang operations as appropriate. I had only done the first mission for the longest time. I also tried a few activities and stole some cars. Eventually, though, I ran out of properties to buy and was taking in a lot of cash per hour, and so had to start doing the missions again. I’ve completed a couple more missions around trying out some activities and scouting out some new areas, but to be honest the missions don’t really thrill me. More on that in a moment.

The activities don’t interest me that much either. Insurance Fraud — throw yourself into cars to rack up money from insurance claims — can be fun, especially once you’re in adrenaline mode and can fly across the road. The activity where you blow things up in a tank is kinda interesting, but a bit slow for my tastes. I tried Mayhem, and found it difficult and annoying, even on the easiest mode (the trick for me seemed to be ticking off the police as well as the gang so that you can get points for blowing them both up). Trafficking wasn’t that much fun either. The most fun were the Escort missions because they involved doing what I was best at (driving around and doing things). All-in-all, the activities were okay to try once or maybe twice, but certainly weren’t going to be things that kept me coming back to the game.

The thing is … the game is kinda fun. As noted, I liked driving around and buying properties — the music is quite fun, especially with the mix tape option to select the music you want to listen to — and the combat parts are all right in small doses, such as hitting a gang operation or gang request, clearing it out, and then hightailing it for home to get the notoriety off of you. But now that those have dried up a little, I have to do the missions, and that’s where I realized one important thing about this game.

This is not my sort of game.

I’ve never really been a big fan of open-world games. The open world design was one of the things that hurt my enjoyment of “Dragon Age: Inquisition”. The only truly open world game that I managed to finish was “Oblivion”. So the ability to go wandering around the open world doing things that I wanted to do was going to wear thin eventually. The only remarkable thing is that it took so long for me to want to go back to the main story missions because I enjoyed driving around and buying properties. But going back to the missions has revealed that so far the story isn’t particularly deep or interesting. Which is to be expected for a game like this, of course, but is still going to run me into trouble. I’m not a fan of open world games, and the missions rely on a lot of heavy action sequences which is not what I’m that fond of either. While I can appreciate the game for what it is, it is a game that’s clearly not the sort of game that I most like to play and playing this one has not given me a deeper appreciation for those sorts of games.

That being said, the game is entertaining. It’s funny at times — although I tend to prefer less coarse humour — and the game mechanisms, especially on causal, are easy and fun enough to, in general, not irritate me, at least for now. So I keep wavering between being dead set on finishing it and then starting the fourth game and planning on finishing it and then moving on to something else.

I’ll have to see how it goes now that about the only thing left to do, at least for now, are the main missions.

Thoughts on “Dark Phoenix”

So, as has been advertised all over the place, my steaming service was offering “Dark Phoenix”, the last of the non-Disney Fox X-Men movies. I wasn’t particularly fond of the previous movie, and heard that this one was not very well received, but it was free and I actually had a little bit of free time, and so since I am a big fan of the X-Men and had seen the previous ones in this incarnation I figured it was a good time to just sit down and watch it.

It wasn’t a very good movie. More below the fold:

Further Thoughts on Coel’s Idea of Subjective Morality

So, last time I dealt with a post from 2013 detailing the reasons Coel thought objective morality made no sense. This time, I’m going to move forward to 2015 and a post that more directly attempts to defend subjective morality. Let’s start with his use of Darwin:

If we ask what morality actually is, the only plausible answer is that morality is about the feelings that humans have about how we act, particularly about how we treat each other. This was proposed by the greatest ever scientist, Charles Darwin, who in Chapter 3 of his Descent of Man stated that that “moral faculties of man have been gradually evolved” and added that “the moral sense is fundamentally identical with the social instincts”.

He explains that in social animals such instincts would take the form that in each individual:

… an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would have been better to have followed the one impulse rather than the other.

The big problem here is … this isn’t true. Our intuitive moral sense isn’t identical to social instincts. Morality quite often comes into direct conflict with social instincts. We often have to violate what we think are the social norms and decide that we don’t care about what society thinks of us in order to do what we think is moral. This is particularly problematic for Coel since in our comments he has continually commented that the big reason we consider acting morally to be important is because we are afraid of social punishment if we don’t conform to morality, but again the paradigmatic cases of morality are ones where we reject the societal consensus and deliberately choose to risk the punishment even in those cases where us doing so has no hope of changing the societal consensus.

Moreover, “an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would have been better to have followed the one impulse rather than the other” is more like practical or pragmatic reasoning than moral reasoning, unless Darwin defines that so broadly that it would apply to any impulse we could possibly have, no matter what reason we should give for why it’s better.

In our discussions and even in his previous post, Coel argued that we shouldn’t rely on our intuitions because they can be wrong. But what else could our “moral sense” be except our intuitive views on what morality is, programmed into us, at least in part, by evolution? If Coel wants to use our evolved sense of morality as an argument, he’s going to have to argue that our intuitions are at least giving us somewhat accurate ideas of morality. Otherwise, he shouldn’t appeal to our moral sense at all, and instead only appeal to the evolutionary purpose that morality has, but then that would definitely be a more objective approach because it would mean that if we didn’t want to do what fulfills that purpose then either we wouldn’t be being moral — violating Coel’s idea that any good morality has to align at least in large part with what we want to do — or else he couldn’t appeal to that purpose in justifying what is moral and so it wouldn’t justify his view of morality. The most he could do is insist we really should want what is dictated by that moral sense … which would then run into trouble if it turns out to be something like the sweet tooth. So there doesn’t seem to be a good way for Coel to use evolution to justify his view without having to provide some sort of non-evolutionary argument to support it, which came up in our comment thread as well: ultimately, if I don’t buy his evolutionary story, there is no way to use the evidence from evolution to prove it correct. You always need to go outside of evolution to settle the objective/subjective debate because the evolutionary evidence supports both views.

Then he references Hume:

The world’s greatest philosopher, David Hume, had earlier arrived at the same conclusion. In his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals Hume explained that “morality is determined by sentiment”, saying that “in moral deliberations” the “approbation or blame … cannot be the work of the judgement”, but is instead “an active feeling or sentiment”.

Hume continues:

In these sentiments then, not in a discovery of relations of any kind, do all moral determinations consist. . . .

… we must at last acknowledge, that the crime or immorality is no particular fact or relation, which can be the object of the understanding, but arises entirely from the sentiment of disapprobation, which, by the structure of human nature, we unavoidably feel on the apprehension of barbarity or treachery.

No-one has ever suggested any alternative account of morals that makes the slightest sense.

The problem is that moral philosophy has pretty much shown that his idea doesn’t actually make more sense than his competitors, despite it seeming to make more sense to Coel. All Coel is doing here — as he did in his first post — is taking the view he likes and insisting that nothing else makes sense, even though to others Coel’s view doesn’t make sense and the others do. This isn’t an argument, but simply a rhetorical tactic to make his view seem the only credible one to those who don’t really know the history of the field and the arguments.

On another note, here Coel blithely labels Darwin the greatest scientist and Hume the greatest philosopher, based only on the fact that he likes their views and thinks that they are really important. This reveals an issue and probably reveals why Coel is having issues here, because to call them the greatest implies an objective classification, but Coel is doing so in a way that’s totally subjective. Thus, Coel reveals that at least in his phrasing he creates sentences that conflate objective criteria with subjective ones. So it’s not unreasonable to think that one of the reasons he thinks that morality is subjective but tries to avoid the downsides of it being subjective is because he tends to use them roughly interchangeably anyway. In this case, what would he say if I denied that Hume was the world’s greatest philosopher, especially since there are clearly more influential and important philosophers than Hume (which is not to say that he’s not influential and important)? Would he insist that Hume really is, or instead retreat to a claim that he finds him to be the greatest and that’s enough? If the former, he’d be making an objective claim that needs defense. If the latter, then he’d be actually treating the proposition as subjective and so it wouldn’t need defense … but then neither would my claim, and no further discussion could be reasonably had. This will come up later as a key component of subjectivist views and a major problem for Coel.

Skipping the aside comment about the only alternative being God — despite the many, many years of secular alternatives in moral philosophy, the field actually studying it — we move on more on his view:

Given our evolutionary past, in a highly social and cooperative ecological niche, we will inevitably have been programmed with moral feelings, feelings about how we act towards each other. Thus morals are rooted in human values and in what we like and dislike. That makes morals, at root, subjective, since the term “subjective” means “based on or influenced by personal feelings, values and opinions”.

The problem with taking definitions of philosophical terms from the dictionary is that it becomes far too easy to overinterpret the definition and so raise issues that philosophers have already seen and deal with. In our discussions and even in his posts, Coel uses this to argue that if there’s any subjective component to morality at all, then morality must be subjective and not objective. And so all hedonistic moralities — based on the happiness of an individual or group — are automatically subjective according to Coel, even though they aren’t subjective in the sense where most of the discussion is because they say that there is a right answer to all moral questions and that that is done by calculating the appropriate happiness. In the last post, Coel talked about the aggregation of the happiness of different people being an issue for the objectivist Utilitarian viewpoints, but ignores that Ethical Egoism wouldn’t have that problem and would still be an objective moral theory because it insists that the only correct way to determine what is moral is to maximize the happiness of the individual. From the perspective of moral philosophy, the objective/subjective distinction that we’re really concerned about is whether the way to determine what is or isn’t moral has one right answer or whether the right answer depends entirely on what one person or group thinks it is, and if another person or group thinks the answer is something different whether there is an actual context where a group outside that group can legitimately say that their view is wrong. Coel at least claims to be a subjectivist in claiming that there is no objectively right answer, but he also wants to say that there is no right answer, but that he is still somehow a subjectivist. This dictionary definition doesn’t support that, of course.

Anyway, Coel’s overextension of the term to include anything that has any subjective component to it makes his view suspect, as his opponents have already concluded that that isn’t sufficient to make it subjective in an important way. That Coel also seems to hold the view that morality is subjective in the stronger sense just makes things more confusing.

Whether an act is regarded as “morally good” or “morally bad” must, in the end, be a statement about how humans feel about the matter. No viable alternative has ever been proposed.

And, again, no viable view of that sort has been proposed either. There are serious issues with that view that end up with us wondering if such a view is anything like morality whatsoever. A big part of this is that there’s a huge range of things that fall into the category of “how humans feel about the matter”. In our comment discussions, one issue was indeed that Coel was claiming that morality was just an aesthetic preference but then still had to claim that morality was a particular sort of aesthetic preference, but then had to deny that there was any way to tell what morality specifically was because that would introduce an objective criteria that would cause him problems (most subjectivists don’t have this issue because they do indeed grasp the difference between the meta-ethical and ethical level). But without that distinction it was easy for me to in many cases claim that what he considered moral wasn’t morality, but was something else entirely. Since he needed those things to count as morality to make his claim about the properties of morality, this led to a frustrating exchange where he would assert clear-cut examples of morality and use that to make claims about what morality really had to be, I would question why he thinks those examples are moral instead of something else, and he’d then complain that there is no such criteria and no right answer to the question.

Either morality is whatever a specific person defines it to be, or it has a definition outside of that. By using the terminology of “how humans feel about the matter”, Coel makes his view seem like the latter but devolves to the former when challenged, which always ends up being equivocating.

But that makes many people unhappy! They want objective status for moral judgements; effectively they want objective backing for what they themselves feel to be morally right.

Again, Coel asserts that the issue is that they want their moral views to be right, which is why they want it to be objective. The idea that they would change their moral views to those that they concluded were objectively morally right is a completely foreign one to Coel, and he had even expressed doubt in the past that such a thing was even possible. This, then, hampers his ability to understand the actual issues that objectivists are concerned about and so leaves him simply asserting that they are only concerned about justifying their own morality based on, at best, what he comes across when dealing with non-philosophers (and, in his case, mostly religious ones).

The most common tactic to try to achieve that is based on the entirely correct idea that one can make objective statements about subjective issues. Thus, Tom’s liking for chocolate ice cream is subjective, but, given that, the statement “Tom likes chocolate ice cream” is objectively true.

I have never seen anyone in moral philosophy actually do this. Coel pulled tricks like that in our discussion, and this is how his “greatest scientist/philosopher” line above has to work, but this is not at all a common tactic in moral philosophy. We understand the distinction between the two cases. He accused me of pulling that line in our discussion, but my line was to say that even if the objective moral principle was “the only moral thing to do is that which maximizes your own personal happiness”, that would still make morality objective. Which is the claim, as we’ve seen, that Coel rejects. So it’s actually equally reasonable for us to accuse Coel of using this tactic, by insisting that even objective statements about subjective things are still, nevertheless, subjective.

In a similar way, one can set up a moral framework by declaring axioms such as “the moral thing to do is to maximise the well-being of sentient creatures”. Given that axiom, it would then be objectively true that, for example, torturing children for no purpose would be immoral. Excellent! People really do feel that torturing children for no purpose must be objectively immoral, that is, immoral in some way beyond “mere” human feelings.

But this approach doesn’t get you an objective scheme, despite how superficially appealing it might be. First, whence that axiom? Unless you can derive that axiom from first principles (which no-one ever has), you are simply declaring it as your moral opinion.

And, of course, every single moral objectivist who has advocated for that — or any other — objective moral principle has started by trying to demonstrate that their view is correct. Many of them, in fact, have come to their objective moral principle by reasoning from what morality seems to be and has to be to work. Coel here presents it as if they are simply presenting an opinion, but trying to establish something with an argument and being wrong is quite different from that. After all, if I look outside and see clouds and a wind rising and predict that there will be a thunderstorm because of that, it’s not a mere opinion of mine, but is instead an actual argument. And it remains an argument even if it ends up being wrong. Coel seems to be completely ignorant of the history of these arguments, which leaves him free to assert that attempts were not made instead of recognizing the reality that very strong attempts were made that Coel would have to deal with to dismiss them.

The only normative standing that such a framework has is through your advocacy, or that of other humans, and that suffices to make the scheme just as subjective as anything else.

This depends on Coel’s idea that normativity requires motivation, which he doesn’t state here. In our conversation, as I’ve already noted, Coel insisted he didn’t know what normativity was and yet felt completely reasonable in making strong declarative statements about what normativity was and had to be.

Second, any notion of “well-being” depends entirely on what people like and dislike, even if it is as basic as the human preference for being alive and healthy over being diseased or dead. All this axiom achieves is placing the subjective element at one remove, sufficiently far that people can fool themselves that they’re on the track to a truly objective morality.

See the above discussion on how Coel insists that if there’s any subjective element at all then the entire thing must be subjective. If we all agreed that what determined what was moral was always the “well-being” of all people, then that — as Coel will admit when pressed — is an objective morality, and is exactly what objectivists are trying to get to. That “well-being” is personal and subjective would not make morality subjective.

Coel then repeats his reasons for the issues that objectivists have with subjective morality from the previous post, but there are some issues here that bring in new arguments and discussion:

In contrast, if morals were “objective” then they could be entirely unrelated to what matters to us. For example, suppose that some god had decreed, in his wisdom, that it was “morally wrong” to wear a garment made from more than one sort of thread. That would be a morality that was unimportant, since we couldn’t care less; there is no good argument from human values for such a prohibition, and so such a “morality” would be entirely disposable.

Here’s the thing: if someone really did believe that what was morally wrong was determined by what that god had decreed, then that would be important to them, and they would adjust their desires and values accordingly. This is how morality works! If Coel wants to argue that such a strong belief wouldn’t be important or give an argument for someone to follow, then it seems like he’s dismissing the concept of morality entirely, not proving it subjective.

At all levels — even the evolutionary one that Coel favours — the way morality works is that if we come to believe that something is moral or immoral we then readjust all of our other values accommodate that judgement. If instead Coel insists that morality must be justified by our own values, then morality has no use and no purpose, and might as well not even exist. That would make it pretty unimportant, in my book.

The problem here is that Coel doesn’t grasp what the argument about morality becoming “unimportant” actually is. As usual, here he’s making a motivational argument: if it’s not related to our desires and values, how can we be motivated to consider it important and critical enough to act on? But the argument about it becoming unimportant is more an argument about moral disagreement, and about challenging our views of morality and looking at things like moral progress, and so on and so forth. Let’s take Coel’s basic view of morality: morality is an aesthetic preference, and it is or can be justified by the consensus of society. So let’s look at a similar preference, that of musical taste. Let’s say that we decide to rank the best musical acts. So we all do our own separate lists, and on one someone has the Beatles higher than AC/DC, with Billy Ray Cyrus far behind. And someone else has Billy Ray Cyrus on top, and the other two way behind. And I put AC/DC on top, the Beatles lower, and Billy Ray Cyrus far behind.

Now, to align with morality as it is generally practiced we’re going to want to come to some sort of ranking that can at least apply at the level of society. So one thing that we could do is take many, many more opinions and come to a general consensus. And it would probably work out that the Beatles would be higher in the list, AC/DC behind them somewhat, and Billy Ray Cyrus rather further down the list.

Okay, great, we have that list but the question at this point is … so what? Imagine that I still insist that AC/DC is the best and the others are far behind. What would that ranking based on societal consensus add to that discussion? If someone pointed to that as evidence or an argument that I was wrong and that the Beatles were better, how should I react to that argument? Well, I shouldn’t take it as any kind of argument at all, because just because almost everyone else likes that band better doesn’t mean that _I_ should. We can see that, in and of itself, it’s not at all an argument for why someone should agree that the band is the best.

So, we do often make these sorts of arguments, but when we do so we tend to end up arguing for that based on an objective criteria. So we would have to argue that what makes a band better than another is that more people like that band better than the others. Or that it is that they sell better than others. Or that they are more complicated musically than the others. And so on and so forth.

But note that with this what we are doing is trying to appeal to an objective criteria to make an objective judgement. That’s why we can actually make statements about better or worse and expect others to take them seriously. This, then, is importing objectivity into the discussion. But this doesn’t change the subjective nature of the debate. If they make all the arguments they can muster, I am still perfectly free to decide that, nevertheless, I like AC/DC better, and continue to buy their albums and even to ignore the other, “better” bands. This is true even if I am convinced that the Beatles are, in fact, the better band. So the argument has no bearing on my internal assessment, but is the only way that we can have any kind of debate worth talking about.

So when we treat these sorts of things as subjective, all that can happen when these sorts of differences and questions arise is an unconcerned shrug. If someone things that a different band is better than the one I think is better there is really nothing for us to be at all concerned about. They like what they like, I like what I like, shrug and move on. And there is no point in trying to work out if I should like what I like or if it would be better for me to like something else. Again, I like what I like, and there is no need for any deep introspection on why I like what I like.

This is not how we treat morality. Even under Coel’s view, we would have to consider the societal consensus important and consider changing our own views if our views clashed with that one. But doing that brings the subjective into the objective realm. So for the questions to have any importance, we must make them objective, and if they remain completely in the subjective realm, they don’t matter. That’s what the objection from importance is: if you make morality subjective, then questions about what is or isn’t moral and about what should or shouldn’t be moral are unimportant and just don’t matter. And if you act like they do beyond your own personal satisfaction, you are incorrectly making the subjective objective.

Coel seems to make that sort of move quite a bit.

Nor does a subjective moral scheme amount to an arbitrary one. Human feelings and indeed human nature are not arbitrary. Indeed, much of our basic human nature derives from evolutionary programming, about which we have no choice. We can’t just decide to feel good about watching a child being tortured for no reason.

In contrast, it is the supposed “objective” rules, the ones that would be, by definition, unrelated to human values and human nature — the rules such as the prohibition on wearing garments of mixed thread — for which there are no good reasons, and which are thus arbitrary.

That’s not what we mean by “arbitrary”.

The idea of it being arbitrary is that without an objective backing, any universal moral scheme can only be formed by picking one for some random criteria that doesn’t justify it. To take on the evolutionary programming example, since we can act against our evolutionary programming and since our evolutionary programming can end up being maladaptive in the world we find ourselves in you cannot use that as an argument to justify our acting on it. We always have to ask whether we should act on it or not. So to make it non-arbitrary you need to be able to appeal to a criteria that justifies the action regardless of whether anyone agrees with that. So an objective one, in other words.

Let me use this example: a bunch of people sit down and come up with a whole bunch of rules for a business. If there’s no business reason for those rules, that would make those rules arbitrary, and they wouldn’t be able to claim that them caring a lot about those rules or even that most people agree with them make them less arbitrary. Also, if someone lacks the evolutionary programming for some of Coel’s rules to insist that that moral scheme wouldn’t be arbitrary if imposed on them — and Coel wants to impose moral views on others — would be utterly incorrect, because the reason to claim those schemes valid would be overturned. Again, we can see that Coel is smuggling in objectivity to deny that embracing subjectivity means losing the benefits of objectivity.

“So you are saying that one person’s morality is just as good as anyone else’s; Ghandi’s morality is no better than that of a sadistic mass murderer!” is the aghast complaint.

This complaint presumes that, if morals were subjective, then we would be unable to rank different people’s ethics. But we can indeed do so, simply by using our own evaluation of their merits. Most people would rate Ghandi’s morality above that of Stalin. What we can’t do is rank them objectively — that means, rank them without any reference to any human judgement on the matter.

The phrase “one person’s opinion is as good as another’s” implies that we can indeed rank the two objectively, and that the two have exactly the same rating. But that is exactly what subjective morality is not doing. There is no such thing as an objective ranking scheme, and thus it is not true that “one person’s opinion is as good as another’s”. Indeed, given that there is no objective standard of morality, that phrase is effectively meaningless.

One can, of course, ask people to rank different ideas, based on their values, and if one did that one would not find that everyone ranked equally. Indeed, most people have no difficulty at all in judging some people as moral exemplars and others as morally bad.

The problem is, as noted above, it’s a ranking that doesn’t at all matter. If someone insists that Stalin was more moral than Ghandi, the fact that most other people disagree would be about as meaningful and useful as someone insisting that Billy Ray Cyrus is the best band of all time. Most people would certainly consider them to be wrong, but other than a vague grumble about that person having “no taste” there’s not much else to say here. The same thing would apply here. If someone liked Stalin’s morality more than Ghandi’s, there’s nothing more to say on the matter.

That’s what we mean by saying that one person’s morality is no better than anyone else’s. If Stalin and Ghandi got together and debated what the moral action was, we couldn’t say that one of them indeed had the better morality, any more than we could say that someone’s preference for Billy Ray Cyrus is worse except in an incredibly snobbish sense.

Saying no one’s morality is any better than any other’s is not an actual ranking, but is a comment that in that sense there is no criteria for ranking anyone and so no one can be ranking. Coel, as usual, wants to talk about us being able to rank these things while insisting that we can’t, which is contradictory. Ultimately, all rankings of the moral views of people are all equally valid because there is no criteria we can use other than our own internal judgements to make that ranking. So if someone says to Coel that Stalin was more moral than Ghandi Coel has no reasonable grounds to dispute their judgement other than saying that his own personal judgement is not the same, in the exact same way as someone would disagree with Billy Ray Cyrus being the best act of all time.

“But if morality is subjective, then you can’t tell someone else that they’re wrong to lie or cheat or steal!!”

Oh yes you can, that is exactly what you can do. You are wrong to lie, cheat or steal. See, I just did!

So, two years later, Coel repeats this facetious comment that he should know by now is not the objection here. We all agree that you can say the words. What we disagree on is whether you can say the words in a way that has any real meaning. If Coel comes to someone and says that they are wrong to like Billy Ray Cyrus, should they at all take that seriously? No, of course not, because musical taste is subjective and what someone else thinks of my musical taste is irrelevant. And this one is decidedly odd because Coel, in our discussions, was insisting that talking about morality in terms of “right” and “wrong” was the wrong and confusing way to do it. So why does he want to preserve that usage here?

It is very easy to offer ones opinions on other people’s conduct, and indeed many of us are rather free with such opinions.

And if they are mere opinions, anyone with any backbone will happily ignore such opinions.

Much of politics consists of people opining on the morality of the government’s policies, or those of opposing parties.

Does Coel not realize that he can’t use that as an example to demonstrate his point because most people think morality is objective and only do so in light of that? For politics in general, people do opine on whether those policies are right or not, but link it to the objective criteria of supporting society, and so aren’t expressing mere opinions.

What you cannot do is claim objective backing behind your opinion. And people really dislike that; they really like to feel that their opinions are not “merely” their opinions but that they reflect some objective property of the world. Well tough; the fact that you might want objective backing for what you regard as fair or just or moral doesn’t mean that the world is like that.

While we do sometimes struggle with that distinction, we are in fact fairly good at understanding what is opinion and what isn’t. Take my own examinations of various movies and books on this blog. It is easy to distinguish between the comments that are objective — for example, that a work doesn’t seem to be aimed at an particular audience — and the ones that are subjective. If you take even the works that I most disliked, if someone said that they agreed with me about its flaws and yet they liked it anyway, there’s nothing else to say. Liking or disliking it — what Coel most often reduces morality to — is just an opinion. And no one can be wrong about their opinion.

No moral philosopher has ever produced a coherent account of what objective notions of fairness or justice or morality (notions that would have to be entirely independent of human judgements) would even mean.

As a basic empirical fact, the world is full of people who have opinions about what is just, fair or moral, but there is a rather striking absence of any other form of justice, fairness or morality.

So, doesn’t Coel have to concede here that there is no true notion of “fair”? He has tried to argue that, but then still argues that some things can be reasonably considered unfair. But if all we have are opinions, then nothing can be reasonably be considered unfair, and no one need care about anyone’s comments on the fairness or unfairness of their actions. This is the consequence that Coel is continually trying to avoid.

People try to influence society about these things, and societies make collective agreements about them. But, that’s it; people and their opinions and their values is all there is.

If everyone in society thought that AC/DC was the worst band in the world, and even tried to enforce that through laws, none of that would amount to any kind of argument that I should take seriously for deciding to not like AC/DC anymore. And, in fact, those personal opinions would be a terrible argument for putting such laws and restrictions on the books, as we all would agree. It’s only that we don’t think of morality as subjective that allows us to make such arguments. That would go away if we accepted Coel’s view, and he has not provided another argument to maintain that behaviour while accepting his subjectivist view.

Well, other than human feelings, there isn’t any. Sorry, but there isn’t. Morality really is about human feelings (including your own) about how humans treat each other. De facto, if you do something that other humans regard as heinous, then they might punish you; and you might also feel bad about it.

But if morality is just about someone’s opinions, why do these things still work? Why should someone feel bad, say, about liking Billy Ray Cyrus, even if most people think his music sucks? What justification would others have for punishing someone for listening to Billy Ray Cyrus, even if they think his music sucks? If we would not accept guilt and punishment for “wrong” musical choices, why should be accept them for “wrong” moral choices? Coel needs morality to be stronger than the aesthetic preferences he calls them, but can muster no argument to justify why that is the case.

It doesn’t work. “The moral thing to do is to maximise the well-being of sentient creatures” says the axiom. OK, but then why are we obligated to maximise the well-being of sentient creatures? Because it’s the moral thing to do!

But what do you mean by “the moral thing to do”? By the axiom, it means only the thing that maximises the well-being of sentient creatures. So, the claim amounts to: we should maximise the well-being of sentient creatures because it will maximise the well-being of sentient creatures.

Again, none of them actually argue that way. They derive the moral principle from an examination of morality and our moral intuitions and examples, so it’s not a tautology. What most people do assume is that once we establish what is or isn’t moral then people should or will have that as their highest value. That is vulnerable to a question about what happens if someone doesn’t want to be moral, but that’s a completely different question. If we came up with a moral system that no one could possibly be motivated by, that could be an issue, but that’s not true of the objectivist moral systems out there. We are not creating tautologies. That’s a complete misinterpretation of the argument.

Ultimately, Coel mixes objective and subjective criteria in an attempt to save subjectivism from its main challenges, but provides no reason to think that it can work. The result is a flip-flop of arguments where he advances the subjective criteria when challenged by objectivist ideas but flips to the objective criteria when challenged on the flaws of subjectivism, which results in a very frustrating argument, not helped by the times he makes glib arguments as actual arguments.

One more post on a debate Coel had with someone is upcoming, before I move on from this.

Get Ready, Get Set … Bake!

New reader Tom has commented on a number of occasions that my viewing tastes and the like are odd and eclectic … and I think he might have missed the time I watched and commented on a show that had young girls singing show tunes.

That series is relevant because it seems that I’ve done it again. No, I’m not watching another show about selecting a start of a musical — although if there was one on I probably would — but that I’ve again found myself actually seeking out and deliberately sitting down to watch a show that you probably wouldn’t expect me to watch (and that _I_ certainly wouldn’t have expected that I’d watch). This time it’s “The Great Canadian Baking Show”.

How I ended up doing that is actually interesting. I recently shuffled around my cable channels and picked up the Canadian game show channel. I also was home a lot and tend to have the TV on for noise, and the channel ran a lot of older game shows in the morning that I hadn’t seen that worked pretty well. But most importantly I tended to just leave it on while eating lunch and “Worst Cooks in America” tended to run at that time, which was just interesting enough to leave on for that short time while I was eating and before I moved on to my afternoon tasks. (It was eventually replaced on the sched with “Undercover Boss” and the revamped “Match Game”, neither of which I cared for as much). Part of the reason I could tolerate it was because I had actually watched and enjoyed similar shows in the past like “Canada’s Worst Driver” and “Canada’s Worst Handyman”, so it’s clear that I have some interest in watching people do perfectly normal things and failing at it, or rather that I like to watch that to see if it’s something that I think _I_ could do or not.

Which leads me to a digression on how those shows handled the concept better than “Worst Cooks in America” did. I admit that I have never actually watched a full season of “Worst Cooks in America”, but my understanding of how it works is that the two main chefs divide the recruits up into teams and then they and the recruits “compete” to see, at the end of the season, which remaining recruits and team are “the best” to win a cash prize. Thus, every episode they eliminate the person who did the worst in order to keep better cooks around. So what you find is that as the show goes along the ones who were hopeless from the start get eliminated and those with at least some ability stay around.

This is a flawed concept (he says about a show that has lasted for 20 seasons, but then he can do so by appealing to a similar show that has had 14 seasons). One of the things that interests people about shows like this is the ability to laugh at how incompetent the people in the show are, especially if they themselves think that they are competent. On this model, the more incompetent cooks are weeded out early which blunts that. Another thing that appeals to people is seeing people who know that they aren’t good but who want to become better actually do become better at it. Again, on this model those people would be eliminated early and never improve. Since the show does quite often try to use that for drama, the model actually ends up making this a bit of a downer ending for most of them unless they just happen to be one of the ones that lasts until the end. Sure, they can talk about how much they have improved and that they were glad they went on the show and promise themselves to keep working on it, but it’s kinda hollow when they get sent home anyway, and only because they started out not being that good at cooking the first place.

The other two shows did it differently. For both, the premise is set up as being a rehabilitation-type centre where the main goal is to take these people and make them better at what the show is working with. This is a more positive premise than the competition one for worst cooks and ties directly into the two appeals mentioned above, as those who are arrogant about their abilities get humbled and those who know they are bad but want to improve can make progress. For “Handyman”, no one is ever sent home, and the goal is for each to completely build a room or apartment where we can see how they’ve improved over time and also can see as a progression how their earlier mistakes made things harder for them later. For “Driver”, the most improved person — and therefore the most rehabilitated person — is sent home every week, and so in theory they get sent home as they learn what they needed to learn, and the last driver wins the rather ignoble honour of being named “Canada’s Worst Driver”. This means that the ones who started out as the better drivers tend to go home first, leaving the worst drivers around. This also means that, for the most part, every story except the last one or two ends up being a hopeful and positive one, especially for those who really did want to improve their driving and end up being improved enough to go home. So it maximizes the two appeals of shows like this, as people who want to see people screw up get to have the worst screw ups stick around longer, while those who enjoy the more positive messages have a greater chance of seeing them with this format. I do think that “Worst Cooks” should have gone with that model.

Of course, “The Great Canadian Baking Show” uses the same model as “Worst Cooks”, but that’s because it’s trying to choose the best baker in Canada, which requires that sort of format. But one of the the things that appeals to me about this show is what also appealed to me about “Over the Rainbow”, which is that while it’s a competition the people on the show are generally pretty nice to each other. They seem genuinely unhappy to see someone leave — even though it means that they are one step closer to winning — and will often help each other out instead of trying to sabotage them or hoping that they’ll fail. As time is running down, if someone is struggling to get things presented often the others will help them out, and in one case someone who was down earlier even offered to help someone else who was running out of time. Obviously, they want to win, but they seem to hang around with each other outside of the competitions and seem friendly with each other, which is nice and much better than other competitive reality shows where the contestants seem to be trying to shaft each other and are exceedingly competitive. To be fair, “Worst Cooks” has that model as well, and more so than “Handyman” and “Driver” did.

Ultimately, that positive approach as well as it being about something that I can understand — if am not particularly interested in myself — makes “The Great Canadian Baking Show” interesting. I also like that the hosts are rather down-to-earth and subdued, with some minor puns but not a lot of over-the-top humour (which might change once they are replaced for season 3). And then this, like all reality competitions and game shows, triggers my ability to enjoy a show if I can find someone to cheer for, which happens here. So, while it’s odd that I’d like a cooking show, it does make sense given my history.

Of course, it will probably be ending soon, so I won’t watch it after that.

Thoughts on “Leprechaun in the Hood”

Last time, I talked about how the fourth movie tried to be a space parody but didn’t quite pull it off because it took some things too seriously to balance with the rather ridiculous leprechaun monster threat and the very ridiculous set-ups for the parody. “Leprechaun in the Hood” is, in fact, even worse, as it creates massive mood whiplash by meshing a very serious structuring plot with the ridiculous leprechaun premise and jokes.

The structuring plot is a black urban drama. The main character — played by Anthony Montgomery of “Enterprise” — is part of a rap group that are trying to make themselves into a success, and his most identifiable trait is that he wants to do so by promoting positive images instead of negative ones. The group ends up with a magic whistle — stolen from a famous musician and gangster — that allows them to be utterly compelling when they perform. Unbeknownst to them, it was originally part of the leprechaun’s horde and he wants it back, which causes him to go out into the world and use his magical powers to turn some women into his mind slaves, and also to chase them down.

The main issue with this is that it seems like it can only appeal to two wildly different audiences. It takes the rapper portion seriously, and while it might not be the best or most faithful representation of inner city life and politics, it’s not simply poking fun at it or mocking that sort of movie. The movie seems a reasonable representation of that sort of thing. Then it tries to marry it to the leprechaun horror plot, which as I’ve noted is one that you simply cannot take seriously. If you like the inner city drama elements, the times when it stops to bring the leprechaun back in will be an annoying distraction at best. On the other hand, if you were more interested in the light comedy-horror aspects, the inner city drama aspects get too much attention and focus and so drag the movie to a halt. The number of people who were really looking for this combination are going to be pretty slim.

Especially since this sort of idea could have worked with a more serious horror element. Imagine that they had the flute, but that it was something like the cursed objects in “Friday the 13th: The Series”: they can use the flute to get the success as rappers they wanted, but there’s a cost to using it. Then we could have an interesting sub-element with the main character’s desire to promote positive messages contrasted with the evil that the flute requires. He could be torn between feeling that the only way to get those positive messages out is to allow for the evil of the flute, hoping that he could stop when he gets successful enough and that the good from the message will outweigh that evil, as we watch him get sucked more and more into the life in general, especially as his friends are far more about the success than about the message. This could be an interesting character idea that could also lend itself to a more interesting exploration of the inner city issues and how they tie into that dynamic and that conundrum.

But this movie has to stop every so often to give us some scenes with a ridiculous horror monster, and so that can’t work.

It was not a terrible movie in and of itself, but the contrast between the two stories makes it so that I can’t imagine watching it again.

Galileo’s Error: Last Chapter and Concluding Thoughts

So, the last chapter in Goff’s book “Galileo’s Error” is entitled “Consciousness and the Meaning of Life” … and is probably a chapter that shouldn’t have been written. It’s basically an attempt to argue for how panpsychism could impact a number of other philosophical and practical discussions, from environmentalism to the free will debate to spirituality and morality. The problem is that the problems he’s addressing are pretty far afield from consciousness per se and possibly because of that his links end up being fairly implausible. Jerry Coyne mocked him for that in talking about free will and while I don’t think it deserves mockery, it does seem like a bit of a stretch to suggest that panpsychism can solve all of these problems. As such, it weakens his case, as the overstated benefits sound a lot more like an exaggerated sales pitch than an actual argument. If it was a sober examination of how a new mindset or how his new science could be brought to bear on such issues, that would be one thing, but it’s not a sober examination making simple suggestions about what panpsychism might allow us to do. Goff’s pie-in-the-sky discussions here are really out of place and not at all informative about panpsychism and how it would work.

At any rate, my concluding thoughts: Goff presents some interesting comments on dualism and materialism that might suggest that a middle ground is possible. However, as a disillusioned materialist he’s probably too strong a critic of materialism. His argument that material science has always succeeded by ignoring things like qualia is valid, but he spends a lot of time pointing out its flaws and little time finding defenses for the criticisms, even though he seems to bend over backwards to defend dualism at times. This makes the work seem a bit uneven.

However, the biggest problem here is that Goff does miss the biggest problem panpsychism faces: coming up with a reasonable conception of what it would mean to say that, say, an electron is conscious. He can’t mean that it has full experiences and qualia because that’s what’s supposed to come when all of those things are aggregated together (which is the problem that Goff recognizes). And it can’t merely be that it has a property that when aggregated produces consciousness because materialism is perfectly compatible with that, and even with emergence. So what could it mean to say that those things are conscious in some way and that that explains how we get to the full-on raging consciousness that we experience? Without that, there is little reason to take panpsychism seriously, and Goff doesn’t even begin to address that question in this book.

I found the book interesting and it did do a good job of expressing that we cannot merely dismiss the idea out of hand, but ultimately it doesn’t really manage to show that panpsychism is the best theory of consciousness, or make a strong argument for it.

Thoughts on the “Twin Peaks” books

So let me finally end my examination of “Twin Peaks” by looking at the three books: “The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer”, “The Secret History of Twin Peaks”, and “The Final Dossier”.

Let’s start with the first one first. “The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer” accompanies the original series and in particular “Fire Walk With Me”, looking at Laura Palmer’s life and descent in more detail. As such, it obviously doesn’t work as a novel unless you have at least seen the original series and probably “Fire Walk With Me”, so that you have an emotional connection to her that connects you to the work and drives the interest. Since this is the intent, however, that shouldn’t count against it.

For the most part, the book works. It’s not as coherent a work as it could be, but that also seems intentional, and there are other works that filled in the background of a work — “The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer” for “Rose Red” is the example I know of — better than it, but it’s still fairly interesting in the context of the series. About the only objection I have is that the diary made Maddie seem more wild than she seemed in the series itself, as she introduced the girls to smoking and sent Laura a sexy dress for … some reason. Her being older certainly could have had her experimented more than they did, but it’s the personality implications that grated with me, not the events themselves.

Still, it’s interesting enough. You don’t need to read it to enjoy the filmed works, but it does fill in some details that are interesting.

Now, onto “The Secret History of Twin Peaks”. This is for the most part a fake history, tracing the mysteries and odd elements and even family and business histories of the town to provide a historical backdrop to the series. It works really well at this, although the focus on UFO sightings is a little odd since those were a minor part of the series itself. The best part about it, though, is that for some of the examples I wanted to go and look to see if some of the things they said were part of the historical record actually were there of if the author had invented it. This is precisely the sort of thing that a good fake history inspires the reader to do, and so I very much approve of it. Filling in the details of the mill and the Sheriff and some other things in the town also worked really well. It’s long and can be plodding at times, and the red ink notes were sometimes hard to read depending on how much light there was, but overall it was a good book.

The same cannot be said for “The Final Dossier”. It purports to clear up some of the details after or around “The Return”, but there isn’t anything all that interesting in it. Moreover, it’s purported to be written by Tamara Preston — whom I think is also the person who comments on the information in “The Secret History of Twin Peaks” — but the tone is often quite snarky, and far more snarky than she actually came across, at least to me, in “The Return”. So the tone not only seems out of character, but also seems to be unprofessional for an agent of the FBI. What we end up with is a work that clashes with at least my perceptions of the work and doesn’t add anything interesting to justify that.

I would read “The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer” and “The Secret History of Twin Peaks” again, but likely only in conjunction with watching the original series and movies again. I don’t think I’ll read “The Final Dossier” again.

Examining Coel’s Idea of Subjective Morality …

… or Error Theory or whatever it is, because he seems to have come up with a mishmash of ideas that he’s trying to present as a full moral theory, but since he in general focuses on attacking objectivism and tends to respond to challenges to his view with a renewed attack on objectivism, he’s never really spent a lot of time trying to build it out as a full theory. Part of the reason for my doing this now is that while working from home I saw this post on his “most popular” list of posts and while waiting for compilations decided to read it, and decided that it might be worth commenting on. It also is something that can work as a supplement to the now probably ended discussion I was having with him in the comments of his own blog, which he hasn’t responded to my last comment in for longer than is usual for him, although these are … interesting times. Anyway, the post I read is an older one, but he did reiterate a number of those points in our discussion and it’s a good starting point for a longer discussion of it. The only big difference I can see — and will talk about as it comes up — that in our discussion he had far more Error Theory elements than the more standard subjectivist elements in that original post.

So, let’s start from his reasons that objective morality is nonsense:

If morality were objective, it would have to be conceivable that the statement “George’s actions were wrong and he deserves to be punished” would be true even if every human in the world were of the opinion, “George’s actions seem fine to me, perhaps even laudable”.

Thus, if morality were an absolute set by a god, something could be immoral even if every human disagreed. If, instead, human feelings and desires are what ultimately count, then that is a subjective morality.

Thus, a subjective morality is strongly preferable to an objective one!

…

Given that an objective morality would be highly undesirable, why do so many philosophers and others continue to try hard to rescue an objective morality?

Actually, the outcome he outlines above is, in fact, one of the main reasons that many objectivists — myself included — find objective morality far more preferable to a subjective one. Take this thought experiment. Imagine that through a combination of past history and evolutionary pressures I ended up with a strong desire to rape and an instinctive idea that rape was, in fact, at least not morally wrong. Given my current view — and the view of my current culture and society, which is really important for Coel and that I’ll get into later — it seems highly desirable to say that regardless of my opinion on the matter, I could still be recognized as wrong in my opinion that rape is moral and even that I be punished for it. In that position, I might not agree with that, but considered from the position of the thought experiment I would have to conclude that the objectivist approach is far more desirable than the subjectivist one. I would indeed really, really like the possibility that rape could be considered morally wrong even if someone really did genuinely believe that it was moral.

This only becomes more desirable when we go up to the level of an entire society. Think of a society like that in the “Gor” novels. The society really does seem to believe that rape is moral, but surely we could see it as desirable that while all or most of them agree on the idea — it seems to be at least as dominant as the counter-idea is in our society — we could indeed say that nevertheless their idea is just morally wrong, and that just because they think it is correct doesn’t mean that their opinion is necessarily valid.

And this also applies when we return to the original example: even if every human or even every sentient being in the universe considered it to be morally right, we consider rape so heinous a crime that it does seem desirable to be able to say that even though no one considers rape to be morally wrong it, nevertheless, is still in fact morally wrong. It is this ability to be able to condemn things as morally wrong even if one person, many people, or even all people don’t consider it morally wrong that drives a lot of objectivists. If there is even one case where the opinion of people could make something that seems inherently immoral actually moral instead, then moral judgements seem utterly impotent.

In a comment Coel expands on why he says that subjective moralities are preferable:

Because if there were an objective morality, and if it were totally misaligned with our human nature and preferences — which is entirely possible — then we would not like it.

Which, again, is one of the reasons objectivists are drawn to objective moralities: that it gives us a reason to do those things or, more importantly, to avoid doing those things even if we would not like to do that. Morality is always explicitly a brake on our desires. Thus, it will always advocate that we do something that we would rather not do. If it always advocated only for what we naturally wanted to do, the morality would be at best unnecessary and at worst utterly impotent. To have a meaningful morality that evolution can select for — which is Coel’s main driver for morality — it is going to have to be the case that we do things simply because we consider them moral, and in opposition to what we actually want to do. Otherwise, it could have no impact on our behaviour. So by definition morality is going to have to get us to do things that we don’t want to do.

In our discussions, Coel did lean towards a somewhat deeper concern, although how much he realized that is open to debate. The issue is that if morality is always in opposition to what we want to do, then what motivation could we have for actually doing it? It would never be what we want to do, and we can only be motivated by wants, so what could motivate us to act morally is morality isn’t asking us to do something that we want to do?

Philosophers have tried to work around this by invoking a strong notion of “moral motivationalism”, which takes the idea of normativity to an extreme by claiming that the normativity to moral pronouncements is so strong that it necessarily motivates us to act on them. This is what Coel had in mind when he discussed normativity, and he was quite insistent that this is what normativity had to mean … despite my pointing out that I rejected it and moral motivationalism outright, and despite his constant comments that he had no idea what normativity actually was. At any rate, I reject moral motivationalism because under whatever model you want to adopt — other than Error Theory, where the question is pointless — moral motivationalism leaves no room for immoral and amoral people. If understanding what it means for something to be moral would necessarily motivate you to act that way, then those who are immoral and amoral can only be those who don’t understand what morality really is, but it seems perfectly conceivable — and, in fact, to be the case in reality — that there are people who understand morality perfectly well but aren’t motivated to act morally. If this is the case, then moral motivationalism is false.

For me, in order to be a moral person you have to decide that being moral is your deepest value and adjust all of your other wants accordingly. Someone may indeed ask what reason they have to do so, but this is the wrong question, as what it does is reduce moral reasoning to practical reasoning. Morality exists to put limits on our practical reasoning and to allow us to put our own interests aside for the interests of others. Reducing moral reasoning, then, to a consideration of our own interests makes moral reasoning impotent, and always raises the idea that if someone is in a position where what is in their own interest is to act immorally, then morality would demand that they act that way, making those actions actually moral. This is the main issue with Enlightened Egoism and is something I always address with the example of Russell from Angel, who pays his taxes and has the wealth to avoid the consequences of his immorality, and so he can do whatever he wants.

So we should never ask how it benefits us to act morally. As soon as we do that, we’re not doing morality anymore and our actions, if we find that answer, will no longer be moral.

Let’s move on:

I suspect that they’re actually trying to attain objective backing for what is merely their own subjective opinion of what is moral.

As noted above, that’s not what drives most objectivists. While of course many of them build their systems to align with what they think is moral, many of them will concede that what they or even most people or their culture consider moral may not be under that system. For the most part, what they are trying to do is attain objective backing for those ideas that everyone considers heinously immoral, like slavery or rape or torture. The issue they have with subjectivists is that those views always devolve into an idea that if a relevant grouping didn’t think those things immoral, they wouldn’t be.

Secular philosophers should not play this game by hankering after objective morality, we should have confidence in the simple and honest “I want …”. We humans have a lot to be proud of: by thinking it through and arguing amongst ourselves, we have advanced morality hugely, with Western society today giving vastly better treatment to individuals, to women, children, religious minorities, foreigners, those of other races, the disabled and mentally ill, criminals, etc, than any previous society.

How can we be proud of advancing morality when morality is subjective and all about what we want? They wanted, at the time, the society that they had, and we want the society we have now. If a society decided that it didn’t want Coel’s “advancements” and changed back to what it had before, how could Coel claim that they had “regressed” morally without having some sort of objective standard to appeal to? Many subjectivists do end up playing this game, where they insist that morality has “improved” but deny that there is any standard that we can use to assess moral quality in the first place.

What they might be able to do is appeal to the art world to settle this, as we have entire academic fields that study the admittedly subjective fields of film, music, art and so on and talk about how things have improved in those fields. However, those still do require an objective standard to appeal to when they talk about improvement. For example, for art in general we can talk about, as I opined in an essay on the topic, the idea that they are trying to convey certain aesthetic experiences and talk about how new techniques can help to do that. Or we can talk about new techniques that make it easier for them to convey a point. All of this works, but once we start to focus on the subjective aspects all of this has to get tossed out. It’s entirely possible for someone to say that those fields have not improved and that they like the new examples less than the old examples, and in fact like the new examples less precisely because of those very techniques. In the academic discussions, this can be debated by appealing to the objective measure, but then this seems far more objective than subjectivists would like. And where the subjectivity holds sway, there is no argument that can be validly raised to say that they are wrong to say that the newer examples have regressed and not progressed. So once we get into talking about moral progress and improvement, we can see that subjectivism has a very difficult time making sense of any idea of that without contradicting itself in some way and weakening its subjectivism.

The only objective principle that Coel can appeal to, from his own arguments, is survival of the species as per evolution. This would result in a very odd idea of morality and one that is in general even in conflict with his own ideas. And doing so would invite us to insist that that is in fact the objective moral principle that Coel denies exists. But if he insists that morality is about a person’s subjective wants, then the only way to judge moral progress is by the opinion of that person themselves. As noted above, that doesn’t lend itself to the sort of claim that Coel actually made above. And even attempts to appeal to a broad social consensus — more on that later — run into the same problem, as if he makes the social consensus too determinate then that’s pretty much an objective standard, and if it’s too weak it can’t support the claims he’s made. So invoking moral progress as a way to assuage our fears about subjectivist morality is not a good one as moral progress is a very problematic concept under moral subjectivism.

Coel then goes into some misconceptions that he thinks is driving the issues with adopting subjectivism:

Subjective does not mean unimportant. A subjective morality is one rooted in human feelings and desires. These are the things that are most important to us, indeed the only things important to us!

The charge that it makes morality unimportant is by, in fact, a comparison with things that we know are subjective. We have strong desires about art and the taste of food and all sorts of things like that, but we wouldn’t want to build a society around them because there’s no good way to aggregate all of the varied tastes we have in society and imposing the tastes of the majority on the minority seems far to tyrannical for things that are just a matter of personal taste. If morality just is a matter of personal taste or opinion, then, it’s difficult to justify imposing that on those who disagree, and yet even Coel’s evolutionary view requires us to do that. That’s not how subjective things work, and yet it’s what Coel and other subjectivists need to do to avoid the “It makes morality unimportant” charge.

Subjective does not mean arbitrary. Human feelings are not arbitrary. It is not arbitrary that we love our children while most of us dislike and fear spiders and snakes, nor that most of us like the taste of chocolate while shunning excrement. Our feelings and attitudes are rooted in human nature, being a product of our evolutionary heritage, programmed by genes. None of that is arbitrary.

The accusation of it making morality arbitrary is not that there are no commonalities among humans or things like that. It’s that it makes it arbitrary in the sense that there is no reason for it and no reason can be given for it, so no argument can be made against someone who disagrees. If someone doesn’t like the taste of chocolate, that’s not a problem with them nor something that they are wrong about. They just don’t like the taste of chocolate. However, we would find that response at least concerning if someone didn’t love their children and downright horrific if they thought that rape was moral. Those don’t seem to be things that someone just has that can’t be justified or challenged, and in fact Coel’s own view forces him to allow for challenge. But subjectivism has no basis for legitimate challenges for morality.

Subjective does not mean that anyone’s opinion is “just as good”. Most humans are in broad agreement on almost all of the basics of morality. After all “people are the same wherever you go”. Most law codes overlap strongly, such that we can readily live in a foreign country with only minor adjustment for local customs. A psychopathic child killer’s opinion is not regarded as “just as good” by most of us, and if we decide morality by a broad consensus — and that, after all, is how we do decide morality — then we arrive at strong communal moral codes.

The problem is that that determination is made by people who, by Coel’s own admission, tend to think that moral claims are objective. Without that, yes it is true that we consider a psychopathic child killer’s opinion on morality not as good as that of the rest of us, but on what basis can we justify that claim? Coel cheats here by using an opinion that we consider horrifically immoral so all of us will accept that they can’t be right, but what about someone who is a slave and wants to end slavery against the opinion of an entire society? Is their opinion therefore as “less good” as the child killer’s? If not, then Coel needs a standard to appeal to to argue that we can classify opinions on morality, but that’s always going to have to appeal to the idea that their opinion is less correct than those of others, but that implies a notion of right and wrong answers, and that’s what Coel explicitly denies, and that most subjectivists have to claim can only apply to a small specific group, even down to one person. If one is an individual subjectivist, everyone’s opinion really is just as good as anyone else’s. If one is a cultural subjectivist — or relativist — then the opinion if each culture is just as good as anyone else’s, but then if a culture condones slavery then their view at the level of competing cultures is as good as any other culture’s — even the one that condemns slavery — and for their own culture their own opinion is clearly superior to that of the culture that condemns slavery (and for that culture their opinion that slavery is wrong is superior to other culture’s opinion that slavery is morally right). Either way, subjectivists have no way to avoid each opinion being as good as any other at the proper level of comparison, no matter how heinous their view may seem to the other group.

Here we finally get into the reasons that objectivity morality is nonsense:

(1) Our morality is evolved.

…

As a product of blind Darwinian evolution, our morals will have developed solely from the pragmatic consideration of what works, what enables us to benefit from cooperation and thus leave more descendants. For interacting with another human, what matters is not what is “objectively” moral (whatever that means), but what that human considers to be moral.

As was pointed out in our long discussion, that also applies to regular facts, as it doesn’t matter what is actually true about the world, but instead on what we think is true about the world, as that’s the only thing that can drive our behaviour. The argument above, then, cannot give us any reason in and of itself to think that morality is not objective, and this is Coel’s go-to argument to show that evolution means that morals cannot be objective. What he eventually ends up arguing is there really are things like objective facts out there and so that’s why our perception of fact is objective, but no such things exist for morality. Of course, this simply presumes that there can be no objective basis for morality, which is what he was supposed to prove, so again the argument doesn’t work. If he can establish that morality cannot be objective, then it is true that we didn’t select for it based on that objectivity, but until he does that we can’t know that.

Another counter is the objectivity of mathematical statements. Coel, in opposition to most people who think about mathematics, thinks that mathematical statements are justified empirically, and so would put at least the ones used by physics in the category of facts about the world. But if I invent a mathematical system called VS-2020 and in it define 2+2=5, then that is as objective a fact as we want morality to be. No one could claim to be using VS-2020 and also assert that 2+2=4; they would be clearly and simply wrong about that, no question.

This is how I meant morality as a conceptual truth in the long discussion with Coel: once we understand the concept of morality, then the statements are true about it. We aren’t going to be allowed to just invent a definition of morality to work with like I did with VS-2020, but then again we have an evolved sense of morality to work with to show that there is a concept here that isn’t just made up or invented. Perhaps this line will not work and we won’t be able to find a reasonable concept of morality to make that work, but if that’s the case that would be Error Theory — morality is a meaningless concept — and not subjectivism. Coel is, in fact, going to have to find a consistent concept of morality if he wants to read from that that morality is really subjective.

(2) Humans are only one species.

An objective morality must, by definition, be independent of human opinion and thus be independent of humans. There are trillions of galaxies in the known universe, each with trillions of stars and trillions of planets, and for all we know there may be millions of species on many of those planets.

And yet, surprise surprise, the “objective” moral systems that people argue for are all about human welfare and just happen to bear a striking resemblance to the morals of that one species of ape on just one planet around a fairly unremarkable star in a fairly unremarkable galaxy. This is simply projection, human hubris.

This is a reflection of not understand the difference between metaethics — which is how morality is defined in general including the objective principles if there is any — and ethics, which is how morality is applied in our daily lives. Obviously, all applications of ethics are going to be human-oriented because right now that’s the only sphere we have where we know morality is being applied. So moral judgements will reflect that. But any good moral theory — even subjectivist ones — is going to have to be able to deal with how it applies to other species that are proper moral agents but have very different physical and social considerations. After all, ought implies can. So to use an example, imagine a discussion of the morality of killing animals to eat between a vegetarian, carnivorous and omnivorous species. For the vegetarian species, killing animals to eat is almost always going to be morally wrong because that would provide them no nourishment (and might even make them sick) so it seems like the only motivation they could have would be to kill the animal and eat it, which most objectivist moral systems would at least look askance at. For the carnivorous species, some kind of meat eating would seem to be morally right — there may be restrictions on how they go about it and what level of sentience they have to stop at — because they need to eat meat to survive and so cannot be required to give that up for their morality, as again ought implies can. For omnivores, it’s far more complicated, because they could live without doing so but it is part of their physical make-up and so a huge benefit to them that way.

The point here is that even the most objective moral systems can take differences in species and environment into account at the ethical level, and so this isn’t an objection against objectivism. In fact, Coel would have more issues with it since for him morality is about providing a framework for social interactions and so he’d need to find some way to extend his evolution-derived morality over a species with a radically different evolutionary history if he wanted humans to form a society or community with them. And if he argues that such things will be common among all species, then he weakens his argument from the start.

(3) Starting from “well being” is subjective.

Many attempts at establishing an objective morality try to argue from considerations of human well-being. OK, but who decided that human well-being is what is important? We did! This whole enterprise starts with a subjective leap. Yes, human well-being is what morality is all about but human well-being is all about human feelings and preferences, and is thus subjective.

Actually, inside moral philosophy, everyone who advocates for starting from considerations of human well-being argues for that being the overwhelming consideration, as evidenced by all of the moral views that don’t use that and, in fact, the idea of “well-being” even when it is referenced is often far different than what we’d expect. So, no, starting from “well-being” is not subjective. It’s a consequence of an objective argument, not merely an assertion of a feeling or preference.

Additionally, all moral systems that rely on the very subjective idea of well-being define precise objective criteria for how it applies and whose well-being applies. Just because they include subjective criteria in their objective moral system doesn’t mean that the system isn’t objective. What makes it objective is that they objectively define where that subjective criteria fits and how to apply it.

(4) Aggregation schemes are arbitrary.

So you’ve decided that well-being is what matters. Good start. But, if you want to arrive at an objective morality you now need a scheme for aggregating the well-beings of many creatures onto some objective scale, such that you can read off what you “should” do and how you “should” balance the competing interests of different people.

…

Of course many people have proposed their own schemes for aggregating, based on their own preferences, but no-one has derived one from objective reasoning. You might consider it “obvious” that everyone counts equally. But then your “objective” morality would require you to treat your own family identically to an unrelated stranger in a distant country. That’s flat out contrary to human nature (and illustrates why we wouldn’t actually want any of these “objective” schemes).

Actually, all of the moral systems that rely on aggregation of well-being had that follow from their arguments for why well-being was what mattered, which are not mere statements of preference but are objective arguments. In fact, that’s what generates the conflict here, as objectively it really does seem reasonable that a moral system should have everyone’s well-being count equally, but our intuitions are saying that we should treat our own family differently. Many systems have come up with arguments to make that work, thus making it objective in a way that it seems Coel can’t conceive. Moreover, unless Coel is going to insist that our moral intuitions are always right, then this sort of clash is always going to arise unless he goes full-on subjectivist, eliminating the conflict only by making all such conflicts meaningless.

I’m going to skip the discussion of God’s morality still being arbitrary and move on the last one as it applies to morality in general:

(6) No-one has any idea what “objective” morality even means.

Lastly, and actually the strongest argument of all, no-one has ever proposed any coherent account of what “objective morality” would even mean! Yes, humans have an intuition about it, but that intuition was programmed for purely subjective and pragmatic reasons (see 1), and thus is a hopeless base for establishing absolute morality.

In our long comment thread, what became clear to me was that this really meant “I can’t understand it/don’t find it coherent therefore there is no coherent account and no possible coherent account!”. For the most part, Coel’s arguments against it being coherent was that he disagreed with it, not that it didn’t make any internal sense. That’s not strong enough to claim that no one knows what it could mean, and yet that was what he insisted on despite my many attempts to point out one that, while he didn’t disagree with it, at least gave a notion of what it would mean for morality to be objective. Again, trying to find an objective morality that he was compelling motivated by was one of his main complaints, which isn’t an objection that can lead to this conclusion.

When asked, the advocate of absolute morality explains that it is concerned with what one “should do”, regardless of human opinion or desire. When asked what “should do” means they’ll replace it with a near synonym, explaining that it is what one “ought to do”. But if you press further they’ll simply retreat into circularity, explaining that what you “ought” to do is what you “should” do, and thus beg the whole question. They can’t do any better than that, though they’ll likely appeal to human intuition, which won’t do for the reasons above.

I have never seen any philosophical advocate of absolute morality pull this trick. Philosophically, it’s always an ought, which is used that way because it is stronger than should. In fact, this is so well-known that in my linguistics class the professor used that as an example of words having different meanings in different contexts, as in normal situations it means “should” but in moral philosophy they are not synonyms or even “near synonyms”.

Coel can argue that my argument that it boils down to a conceptual truth which can be summarized as “In order to be moral, you must do X” which can be somewhat paraphrased into “If you want to be moral, you must do X” is pulling this trick because of the “If you want to be moral” part, but that only works if you think of “ought” as “should”, which then ties back to desires. Since that’s not what “ought” means, it’s not an example of a trick. It does clash with the idea of moral motivationalism as it allows that one can understand what is moral without being motivated by, but as seen already I reject that idea so it’s an objection but not an example of me pulling a trick.

Anyway, those are the reasons that he, back in 2013, thought objective morality was nonsense, but the arguments don’t actually establish that. There are a couple of other posts that I saw and read linked from this one and recommended, so I’ll talk about those over the next couple of weeks.

Curling Free Agency Period …

Yes, it’s actually called that.

I haven’t been paying much attention to curling because I knew that the women’s World Championships were canceled and figured that at least some of the remaining events on the Grand Slam would be canceled, and so there was no curling on TV for me to watch. I did watch a couple of re-runs, but now I’ve decided to use Dark Shadows as my noise while working and so am not even looking to see what’s running. As such, I didn’t bother checking in on the curling news, figuring that there wouldn’t be much happening, especially since the Olympics trials were coming up and so teams probably wouldn’t be making any major moves at the end of this season.

Oops.

Since I only really follow women’s curling, I’m only going to talk about the moves among the women and ignore the ones among the men. And there might be more changes than listed in that article, but I’m not going to try to dig them all up.

Let me start with the move that probably should be the biggest one but actually isn’t: the implosion of Chelsea Carey’s team. The front end moved on to join Kelsey Roque’s team, and the third went … somewhere I’ll talk about later, actually (savour the suspense!). This is a bit of a surprise because the team was generally fairly successful, particularly at national tournaments. However, she’s had teams dump her on multiple occasions in the past. I’ve found her to be a bit fragile emotionally and mentally, although she did seem to be much better this time around. Still, that her team would completely up and leave her is a bit worrying. People do think that she will find another team, but you have to wonder if she’s problematic in some way which causes teams to want to leave her at some point.

Also, surprisingly, Jamie Sinclair — who had won the Player’s Championship two years ago — was ditched by her team who decided to carry on without her. She was struggling for the past few seasons, but she had always been seen as a skilled curler, so it’s weird that they would just ditch her like that.

And most surprisingly at all, the generally rock solid, long-standing team of Rachel Homan has changed. Their long-time lead Lisa Weagle is out, and Sarah Wilkes — Chelsea Carey’s former third — is in at second, with long-time — but less than any of the others — second Joanne Courtney taking over at lead. This was a decision made by the team and from all of the reports Weagle didn’t hear anything about it until the decision was made. Homan had done well in national events this year but poorly on the Grand Slam, but for me it’s hard to see this as a curling decision, as Courtney seemed to be the weak link on the team whenever I watched them, not Weagle. There are comments that Wilkes is a much better sweeper than Weagle is, but even with that the combination were possibly the two best sweepers in the women’s game, so that doesn’t seem like a pressing need.

Now, what is interesting about this is that Wilkes lives in Alberta, which is where Courtney lives and where Homan’s husband lives and Homan herself now is going to school. There were some issues last year over a feeling that Homan was exploiting the rule about being able to play for your “home” residence while going to school to keep the team together. Wilkes was born in Toronto and from what has been said is using that to allow the team to remain an Ontario team — which makes me wonder why Homan didn’t just use that rule herself — but the fact that three of the four are from Alberta and you can have one dedicated import, along with the fact that Homan has been known to exploit rule loopholes in the past — I think that what she did was completely legitimate and within the rules, but being able to live with her husband while still having an “Ontario” team surely played a part in her thinking — makes me think that location is a bigger factor here than actual skill level. At a minimum, right now three of the four live in the same province, which makes getting together for practices a lot easier, especially since two of them — Homan and Courtney — are new parents with something else to place a demand on their time than curling. Eventually, Homan was going to lose the student exemption, and if Wilkes works out — and she has subbed on the team before — then they could convert from an Ontario team to an Alberta team simply based on residency. Also, Wilkes played third on Carey’s team, and I have commented before that Emma Miskew is running the team a lot more than Homan is at times. If Miskew decides to leave after this Olympic cycle to form her own team, Wilkes can easily slide back to third, Courtney can go back to second, and then they’d only need a new lead to fill out the team (and they have some options in the Kreviazuk family to possibly fill that hole).

Meanwhile, Weagle has joined Jennifer Jones’ team as an alternate. I can’t imagine that lasting for long, so either one of Jones’ team will be out, or Weagle will move on in fairly short order.

Anyway, lots of shuffling, and it may not be done yet.