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Sure. There's an old saying, "you're entitled to the effort, but not the outcome." You can plan to do something, but you cannot ensure that the effects of your

Sure. There's an old saying, "you're entitled to the effort, but not the outcome." You can plan to do something, but you cannot ensure that the effects of your actions are limited or constrained to merely what you intended. The distance between what we expect to happen and what actually happens is therefore a measure of how well our ethical reasoning lines up with our moral compass. But this is precisely what predictive modelling gives us; a model shows us approximately what will happen, according to some mechanism of action. If we want to see some particular change in the world, then the predictive model shows us what we should do in order to effect that change. To be concrete and continue talking about Christianity, it is a common feature of many different Christian practices around the world to catastrophically misunderstand COVID-19 and SARS-COV-2. Church buildings offering in-person services, church leaders reusing masks in ceremonies, church leaders claiming to remove COVID-19 from communities with holy power, etc. Many of these practices seem to be based on delusional beliefs about cellular biology, combined with magical thinking about the power of prayer and baptism. While I don't doubt that these folks would like COVID-19 to go away, they are not behaving as if they want that to be the case. A nibling comment precisely says "is-ought" as if it's a checkmate. I would reply that the entire idea of morality is contingent on who we consider to be agentive and what choices we expect them to make. Pirsig considered atoms to be moral when they obeyed the laws of chemistry; Conway considered the fact that particles are morally required to contextualize their behavior. Both of them took this stance because they realized that atoms are sometimes forced to make choices. To complete the analogy, we can use predictive modelling to perform chemical reactions and expect that the chemicals ought to react within a certain time to produce certain yield and byproducts, even though the reaction isn't obligated to do so just by thermodynamics alone.

jmoss20 6y ago
Doesn't this assume that morality has mostly to do with consequences (effects/outcomes/...)? That's a reasonable idea, but it's relatively modern. Semitic religions seem more concerned with (or at least, also very concerned with) intention, no matter what actions and downstream consequences those may or may not bring about.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  It's true that pragmatism, as a philosophical orientation, is young; it's a 20th-century invention of the USA. Nonetheless it is only young because earlier philosophy gave so much special consideration to humans; as soon as we want to consider non-human agents, then pragmatism is far simpler than god-given ensoulment when it comes to figuring out why humans do what they do. Also, by no measure should we simply pick up and embrace philosophy from 900-500 BCE without carefully examining it, and that includes all of the Abramic religions. We know how much of the old stories were not just mythic, but deliberately distorted in order to exaggerate the importance of various kingdoms in the Levant and justify military campaigns. Finally, if we only concentrate on intent, then we eventually arrive at thoughtcrime. But thoughtcrime is undetectable; we cannot build a society out of forbidding thoughcrime, and we can't even build a morality beyond "don't think the bad thoughts". From this angle, pragmatism is a clear and obvious upgrade which removes psychological baggage.
tengbretson 6y ago
Talking about measuring morality by how effectively it turns intent into outcomes misses the fundamental problem of determining the goodness or badness of the intent.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  Are you really so certain that good is measurable? Or that good even exists? Good vs. bad is but the tip of the moral iceberg; we are not merely concerned with whether our actions will please some deity trapped on a cosmic battleground, but the precise nature of what our actions will effect in the world. To pop out and flip around an old Christian argument, your position is like saying that color photography misses the fundamental problem of determining what a given shot would have looked like in greyscale; it's like asking somebody who sees full color to explain each different color to somebody who only sees black and white. I could say that each color is kind of like white and kind of like black, but really it's more like a mix of both, but really it's not like either at all. And once we stop saying "good" or "bad", and start saying instead quantifiable measurements, like "number of meals prepared" or "number of houses built", then we see that there's a little good and a little bad in everything. Pirsig had a way around most of this, but even he still talked of "good" as something that one person measures/evaluates/observes in another person, and we might interrogate him by asking, "What about that person is good?" to which he might have replied, "I see a certain thing about them, and I perceive this thing to be good."

jmoss20 6y ago

Doesn't this assume that morality has mostly to do with consequences (effects/outcomes/...)? That's a reasonable idea, but it's relatively modern. Semitic religions seem more concerned with (or at least, also very concerned with) intention, no matter what actions and downstream consequences those may or may not bring about.

Kednicma 6y ago
It's true that pragmatism, as a philosophical orientation, is young; it's a 20th-century invention of the USA. Nonetheless it is only young because earlier philosophy gave so much special consideration to humans; as soon as we want to consider non-human agents, then pragmatism is far simpler than god-given ensoulment when it comes to figuring out why humans do what they do. Also, by no measure should we simply pick up and embrace philosophy from 900-500 BCE without carefully examining it, and that includes all of the Abramic religions. We know how much of the old stories were not just mythic, but deliberately distorted in order to exaggerate the importance of various kingdoms in the Levant and justify military campaigns. Finally, if we only concentrate on intent, then we eventually arrive at thoughtcrime. But thoughtcrime is undetectable; we cannot build a society out of forbidding thoughcrime, and we can't even build a morality beyond "don't think the bad thoughts". From this angle, pragmatism is a clear and obvious upgrade which removes psychological baggage.

tengbretson 6y ago

Talking about measuring morality by how effectively it turns intent into outcomes misses the fundamental problem of determining the goodness or badness of the intent.

Kednicma 6y ago
Are you really so certain that good is measurable? Or that good even exists? Good vs. bad is but the tip of the moral iceberg; we are not merely concerned with whether our actions will please some deity trapped on a cosmic battleground, but the precise nature of what our actions will effect in the world. To pop out and flip around an old Christian argument, your position is like saying that color photography misses the fundamental problem of determining what a given shot would have looked like in greyscale; it's like asking somebody who sees full color to explain each different color to somebody who only sees black and white. I could say that each color is kind of like white and kind of like black, but really it's more like a mix of both, but really it's not like either at all. And once we stop saying "good" or "bad", and start saying instead quantifiable measurements, like "number of meals prepared" or "number of houses built", then we see that there's a little good and a little bad in everything. Pirsig had a way around most of this, but even he still talked of "good" as something that one person measures/evaluates/observes in another person, and we might interrogate him by asking, "What about that person is good?" to which he might have replied, "I see a certain thing about them, and I perceive this thing to be good."