5 ms·

Morality and law both work like mathematics. This means that my beliefs are constructed, and once I have a construction, the only in bounds way to convince me t

by ouid 4y ago

Morality and law both work like mathematics. This means that my beliefs are constructed, and once I have a construction, the only in bounds way to convince me to change my mind about them is to show me that my beliefs are inconsistent. Moreover, understanding someone who has already demonstrated an inconsistent belief system is easy. They believe X because they believe something and its negation, and at least one of those implies X. Trying to unravel exactly how they have managed to go from an inconsistency to whatever thing they want to believe isn't really that interesting or important. The point is that their entire moral philosophy is broken and is exclusively used to justify whatever they want. This is why you have things like the prosperity doctrine.

guerrilla 4y ago
> the only in bounds way to convince me to change my mind about them is to show me that my beliefs are inconsistent No, you can also refute the premises/axioms and there other ways to do that than needing to demonstrate inconsistency.
- ouid 4y ago
  Oh really? Would you like to provide an example of this?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ironmagma 4y ago
    A simple example is the axiom "private property exists and should be enforced with the law". There are societies without private property, and they are very different from the ones that do have it.
    - ouid 4y ago
      I tshould have been clearer about what I mean by the law. I'm treating the laws themselves as immutable, and referring to the process of their interpretation. Ie, the judgment that happens in a courtroom. Which laws should exist depends on moral arguments though. So the point does essentially stand. The fact that people act out of mostly inscrutable, heuristic biological interest as a form of moral empiricism, does in fact count as out of bounds. I'm allowed to have a moral system that compels me not to reproduce, for instance. It's just not terribly likely (although not impossible) to be an effective reproductive strategy. If you want to have a completely unrelated discussion about this, I'm more than willing, but I think you should probably refine the proposition "Private property exists".
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Sure, I refer you to the entire Western canon of ethics because that's 99% of what it consists of. If you want a simple math example, we replaced Euclid's axioms of geometry with Hilber's axioms of geometry and others. Look into why. Then there's the fact that axioms and premises that make empirical statements which can be falsified. Those get thrown out all the time.
    - ouid 4y ago
      We didn't replace Euclid's axioms. I'm sorry that you think so, because it is a common misconception that mathematics "believes in a set of axioms". The euclidean axioms are a foundation for the logical system of euclidean geometry. Eucliden geometry is not only unchanged, but is actually a system which has been proven to be consistent and decideable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_axioms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_axioms. This makes it rather uninteresting, which is why we now study a different system. Empiricism, likewise, is an axiom that goes. That which I observe exists, and then if you would like to keep that axiom, you're going to have to throw away anything else that is shown to be inconsistent as a result. Which is in bounds.
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        I think you misunderstood what I said and may have demonstrated a little ignorance at the same time. Hilbert's axioms are axioms for Euclidean geometry, like Tarski's and Birkhoff's. > That which I observe exists This isn't even close to what empiricism is. You named a (very poor) ontological principle. Empiricism is a set of epistemological principles.
        ouid 4y ago
        First point: this is why I wrote the logical system of Euclidean geometry. Propositions in that language, and the proofs therein, have not changed. Second point: That is most definitely what empiricism is. Moreover, I have just given you a set of epistemological beliefs. It's a set with a single element, and it in fact characterizes empiricism. I don't know what else to tell you.
tines 4y ago
Great point about the prosperity doctrine. Such a cancer.
dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
> Morality and law both work like mathematics. This is something only engineers are able to believe.
- ironmagma 4y ago
  Not true at all. It's something philosophers and mathematicians have explored. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlQaP4c_Jxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlQaP4c_Jxk
  - dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
    I think you're conflating the philosophy of mathematics with describing the entirety of philosophy (or even just morality) using mathematics. I cannot claim to understand philosophy but I can claim to understand law, and it is _not_ like mathematics. Human discretion is paramount to the system, and laws are written in such a way that humans reinterpret them afterwards, as influenced by their own cultural and social bias. How is this like mathematics? Do you need a jury to decide if a theorem is true? I have met many engineers who treat law as if it is supposed to be exact and mathematical. They become very annoyed when it does not conform to this view, or when laws aren't written in an even more detailed, step-by-step breakdown. That is not how it works. There's a reason there's discretion in the system, if you try to regulate something as inherently chaotic as human behaviour with inflexible rules, you get crypto.
    - ironmagma 4y ago
      I missed the reference to "law" in the parent comment. I won't attempt to tackle that except to say, we humans are machines as well, and just because we are hard to predict doesn't mean we don't generally behave according to some rules. Our laws are generally informed by the cultures the judges grew up in, for example, so any court rulings will be mostly a result of that and the ethics set down by the prevailing morals. We probably won't see any "private property no longer exists" rulings coming out of the courts anytime soon. Edit: changed example
ironmagma 4y ago
Generally agree and find the same. However, I would argue moral philosophy is inherently built on unprovable axioms. The criticism "used to justify whatever they want" is actually a necessary feature to morality, because the whole point of morals is that not everyone shares your morals. If they were shared by everyone, they would just be objective truths.
- ouid 4y ago
  different starting points can yield different results without producing a fundamental problem. It's like the score in a video game. But it is bad if a starting point can yield any result, or a result and its negation, at that point you provably might as well believe anything.
  - ironmagma 4y ago
    The score in a video game is like the sum of edge costs in a path within a graph. A "morality" is the entirety of the graph, the whole system. So it's apples to oranges.
- robonerd 4y ago
  At the bottom of the intersection between moral philosophy and politics is a firm foundation: "Most of us believe X and it doesn't matter if you disagree because we're willing to use force if you don't comply." Nobody wrings their hands that a murderer doesn't share the unprovable moral axioms of those who oppose murder. If a somebody refuses to comply with the anti-murder laws, then force is is used to stop him. Problem solved, no need to consult the philosophers.
  - ironmagma 4y ago
    That's more the realm of law. Morals can exist outside of force, it's just that communities tend to form around common morals, and if you go against the moral grain you will be sowing dissonance in your area, possibly to the point where you'd want to move out (i.e. too alienated). I would argue a great many locales in the USA are full of moral dissonance, and this is one of the major things holding us back from having strong communities.
RobertRoberts 4y ago
To add to this, _everyone_ has some kind of inconsistent belief system. It's fairly simple to determine this, when people get defensive it's almost certainly based on something incongruous between their beliefs and actions, or possibly broaches a belief they hold to be true, but are unable to demonstrate why it's true. Therefore causing defensive behavior when challenged. I.E., very few people get upset if you say "the sky is not blue", as this is non-threatening to their beliefs and they can verify the truth themselves. But state "your political position X is based on this specific false premise of Y", if someone holds this position strongly but cannot justify it will often trigger an emotional and often irrational defense.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > To add to this, _everyone_ has some kind of inconsistent belief system. It's fairly simple to determine this, when people get defensive it's almost certainly based on something incongruous between their beliefs and actions, or possibly broaches a belief they hold to be true, but are unable to demonstrate why it's true. Therefore causing defensive behavior when challenged. This is silly folk psychology. There are many reasons people get upset when people contradict them, raging from respect issues to believing that such contradictions are actual mortal dangers. People get quite upset when you disagree with their belief that all people have a right to life and counter with the proposition that the group they belong to should be exterminated, for example. It has nothing to do with their alleged inability to debate you. It's that you've indicate you're a threat to their life. People get quite upset when you strawman them or condescend or patronize in your response. There's a whole rainbow of reasons to get upset and very few of them are about some inability to debate you.
  - RobertRoberts 4y ago
    I was pointing out _one_ simple idea (that everyone has _something_ inconsistent) not a broad brush about everything and everyone is inconsistent.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
stale2002 4y ago
No, thats a pretty bad way of thinking about things. A person can be 99% correct on the issue, and you coming in, and find a single, tiny, irrelevant flaw or absurd edge case does not overrule the 99% correctness of the original position. Instead of that, it is perfectly possible to compare and differentiate between people who are mostly right, and people who are very wrong on most of it.
car_analogy 4y ago
Calling inconsistent beliefs a sign that they justify whatever they want is overly harsh. Rather, it has been shown [1] that people come to their beliefs by intuition, and rationalize them post-hoc. Just because a belief is intuitive and not constructed from moral axioms (meaning their beliefs appear inconsistent by their stated rationalization) does not mean it is arbitrary ("whatever they want"). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind
- ouid 4y ago
  This does not contradict anything that I said. It's not harsh to refer to the argument as being worthless in this case. It might as well not exist. One can be well served by a belief system that justifies nothing, or a belief system that is full of contradictions, but listening to them rationalize it isn't going to help me understand any better than it helped them (which was not at all).
  - car_analogy 4y ago
    It doesn't contradict most of what you said, except this part: > their entire moral philosophy [..] is exclusively used to justify whatever they want Unless by "want" you mean "selfishly desire or selflessly believe is the morally right thing", and not the common use of only "selfish desire".
    - ouid 4y ago
      By want I mean want. I wasn't assigning moral judgments at this point because that would have been circular. I said "whatever they want" in order to distinguish it from an unqualified "whatever". The prosperity doctrine stuff was a motivated example, but not meant to be representative.
      - car_analogy 4y ago
        "Want" is highly ambiguous. For example, a lawyer that believes everyone has a right to a competent legal defense may find a client personally abhorrent, but take their case anyway out of a sense of duty. It is highly misleading to describe this as the lawyer "doing whatever they want", even if that is technically true by some definition of "want", and even if the lawyer's rationalization of this is found to be internally inconsistent, or inconsistent with some other aspect of their behavior.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> the only in bounds way to convince me to change my mind about them is to show me that my beliefs are inconsistent Have you not examined your beliefs at all? No 100% consistent belief system has even been invented, because the different principles that allow advanced society to exist conflict with each other - duty to the collective, freedom, equality, etc. Should the tolerant, tolerate people who are Nazis? Should people be forced to serve in the army against their will to defent freedom? Should you have the freedom to choose the more expensive lawyer, and if so should the law apply equally to the rich and the poor? the examples go on forever.
- ouid 4y ago
  It's trivially easy to create a consistent belief system. Simply have no beliefs. The mutually exclusive properties are consistency and completeness (although these can be mutually satisfied in certain limited circumstances not likely to be relevant here). You can have no belief at all about abortion. In that case, you are free to choose one as an axiom, although you are also free to not choose. If you choose a belief about abortion as an axiom and the result is that you end up believing both a thing and its negation, then you will need to abandon one of the necessary premises for that construction.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > It's trivially easy to create a consistent belief system. Simply have no beliefs The point of a belief system is to be of practically usefull in life, not to.. whatever are we achieving here exactly?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by ouid 4y ago

guerrilla 4y ago

> the only in bounds way to convince me to change my mind about them is to show me that my beliefs are inconsistent No, you can also refute the premises/axioms and there other ways to do that than needing to demonstrate inconsistency.

ouid 4y ago
Oh really? Would you like to provide an example of this?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ironmagma 4y ago
  A simple example is the axiom "private property exists and should be enforced with the law". There are societies without private property, and they are very different from the ones that do have it.
  - ouid 4y ago
    I tshould have been clearer about what I mean by the law. I'm treating the laws themselves as immutable, and referring to the process of their interpretation. Ie, the judgment that happens in a courtroom. Which laws should exist depends on moral arguments though. So the point does essentially stand. The fact that people act out of mostly inscrutable, heuristic biological interest as a form of moral empiricism, does in fact count as out of bounds. I'm allowed to have a moral system that compels me not to reproduce, for instance. It's just not terribly likely (although not impossible) to be an effective reproductive strategy. If you want to have a completely unrelated discussion about this, I'm more than willing, but I think you should probably refine the proposition "Private property exists".
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Sure, I refer you to the entire Western canon of ethics because that's 99% of what it consists of. If you want a simple math example, we replaced Euclid's axioms of geometry with Hilber's axioms of geometry and others. Look into why. Then there's the fact that axioms and premises that make empirical statements which can be falsified. Those get thrown out all the time.
  - ouid 4y ago
    We didn't replace Euclid's axioms. I'm sorry that you think so, because it is a common misconception that mathematics "believes in a set of axioms". The euclidean axioms are a foundation for the logical system of euclidean geometry. Eucliden geometry is not only unchanged, but is actually a system which has been proven to be consistent and decideable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_axioms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_axioms. This makes it rather uninteresting, which is why we now study a different system. Empiricism, likewise, is an axiom that goes. That which I observe exists, and then if you would like to keep that axiom, you're going to have to throw away anything else that is shown to be inconsistent as a result. Which is in bounds.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      I think you misunderstood what I said and may have demonstrated a little ignorance at the same time. Hilbert's axioms are axioms for Euclidean geometry, like Tarski's and Birkhoff's. > That which I observe exists This isn't even close to what empiricism is. You named a (very poor) ontological principle. Empiricism is a set of epistemological principles.
      - ouid 4y ago
        First point: this is why I wrote the logical system of Euclidean geometry. Propositions in that language, and the proofs therein, have not changed. Second point: That is most definitely what empiricism is. Moreover, I have just given you a set of epistemological beliefs. It's a set with a single element, and it in fact characterizes empiricism. I don't know what else to tell you.

tines 4y ago

Great point about the prosperity doctrine. Such a cancer.

dj_mc_merlin 4y ago

> Morality and law both work like mathematics. This is something only engineers are able to believe.

ironmagma 4y ago
Not true at all. It's something philosophers and mathematicians have explored. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlQaP4c_Jxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlQaP4c_Jxk
- dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
  I think you're conflating the philosophy of mathematics with describing the entirety of philosophy (or even just morality) using mathematics. I cannot claim to understand philosophy but I can claim to understand law, and it is _not_ like mathematics. Human discretion is paramount to the system, and laws are written in such a way that humans reinterpret them afterwards, as influenced by their own cultural and social bias. How is this like mathematics? Do you need a jury to decide if a theorem is true? I have met many engineers who treat law as if it is supposed to be exact and mathematical. They become very annoyed when it does not conform to this view, or when laws aren't written in an even more detailed, step-by-step breakdown. That is not how it works. There's a reason there's discretion in the system, if you try to regulate something as inherently chaotic as human behaviour with inflexible rules, you get crypto.
  - ironmagma 4y ago
    I missed the reference to "law" in the parent comment. I won't attempt to tackle that except to say, we humans are machines as well, and just because we are hard to predict doesn't mean we don't generally behave according to some rules. Our laws are generally informed by the cultures the judges grew up in, for example, so any court rulings will be mostly a result of that and the ethics set down by the prevailing morals. We probably won't see any "private property no longer exists" rulings coming out of the courts anytime soon. Edit: changed example

ironmagma 4y ago

Generally agree and find the same. However, I would argue moral philosophy is inherently built on unprovable axioms. The criticism "used to justify whatever they want" is actually a necessary feature to morality, because the whole point of morals is that not everyone shares your morals. If they were shared by everyone, they would just be objective truths.

ouid 4y ago
different starting points can yield different results without producing a fundamental problem. It's like the score in a video game. But it is bad if a starting point can yield any result, or a result and its negation, at that point you provably might as well believe anything.
- ironmagma 4y ago
  The score in a video game is like the sum of edge costs in a path within a graph. A "morality" is the entirety of the graph, the whole system. So it's apples to oranges.
robonerd 4y ago
At the bottom of the intersection between moral philosophy and politics is a firm foundation: "Most of us believe X and it doesn't matter if you disagree because we're willing to use force if you don't comply." Nobody wrings their hands that a murderer doesn't share the unprovable moral axioms of those who oppose murder. If a somebody refuses to comply with the anti-murder laws, then force is is used to stop him. Problem solved, no need to consult the philosophers.
- ironmagma 4y ago
  That's more the realm of law. Morals can exist outside of force, it's just that communities tend to form around common morals, and if you go against the moral grain you will be sowing dissonance in your area, possibly to the point where you'd want to move out (i.e. too alienated). I would argue a great many locales in the USA are full of moral dissonance, and this is one of the major things holding us back from having strong communities.

RobertRoberts 4y ago

To add to this, _everyone_ has some kind of inconsistent belief system. It's fairly simple to determine this, when people get defensive it's almost certainly based on something incongruous between their beliefs and actions, or possibly broaches a belief they hold to be true, but are unable to demonstrate why it's true. Therefore causing defensive behavior when challenged. I.E., very few people get upset if you say "the sky is not blue", as this is non-threatening to their beliefs and they can verify the truth themselves. But state "your political position X is based on this specific false premise of Y", if someone holds this position strongly but cannot justify it will often trigger an emotional and often irrational defense.

guerrilla 4y ago
> To add to this, _everyone_ has some kind of inconsistent belief system. It's fairly simple to determine this, when people get defensive it's almost certainly based on something incongruous between their beliefs and actions, or possibly broaches a belief they hold to be true, but are unable to demonstrate why it's true. Therefore causing defensive behavior when challenged. This is silly folk psychology. There are many reasons people get upset when people contradict them, raging from respect issues to believing that such contradictions are actual mortal dangers. People get quite upset when you disagree with their belief that all people have a right to life and counter with the proposition that the group they belong to should be exterminated, for example. It has nothing to do with their alleged inability to debate you. It's that you've indicate you're a threat to their life. People get quite upset when you strawman them or condescend or patronize in your response. There's a whole rainbow of reasons to get upset and very few of them are about some inability to debate you.
- RobertRoberts 4y ago
  I was pointing out _one_ simple idea (that everyone has _something_ inconsistent) not a broad brush about everything and everyone is inconsistent.
  - guerrilla 4y ago

stale2002 4y ago

No, thats a pretty bad way of thinking about things. A person can be 99% correct on the issue, and you coming in, and find a single, tiny, irrelevant flaw or absurd edge case does not overrule the 99% correctness of the original position. Instead of that, it is perfectly possible to compare and differentiate between people who are mostly right, and people who are very wrong on most of it.

car_analogy 4y ago

Calling inconsistent beliefs a sign that they justify whatever they want is overly harsh. Rather, it has been shown [1] that people come to their beliefs by intuition, and rationalize them post-hoc. Just because a belief is intuitive and not constructed from moral axioms (meaning their beliefs appear inconsistent by their stated rationalization) does not mean it is arbitrary ("whatever they want"). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

ouid 4y ago
This does not contradict anything that I said. It's not harsh to refer to the argument as being worthless in this case. It might as well not exist. One can be well served by a belief system that justifies nothing, or a belief system that is full of contradictions, but listening to them rationalize it isn't going to help me understand any better than it helped them (which was not at all).
- car_analogy 4y ago
  It doesn't contradict most of what you said, except this part: > their entire moral philosophy [..] is exclusively used to justify whatever they want Unless by "want" you mean "selfishly desire or selflessly believe is the morally right thing", and not the common use of only "selfish desire".
  - ouid 4y ago
    By want I mean want. I wasn't assigning moral judgments at this point because that would have been circular. I said "whatever they want" in order to distinguish it from an unqualified "whatever". The prosperity doctrine stuff was a motivated example, but not meant to be representative.
    - car_analogy 4y ago
      "Want" is highly ambiguous. For example, a lawyer that believes everyone has a right to a competent legal defense may find a client personally abhorrent, but take their case anyway out of a sense of duty. It is highly misleading to describe this as the lawyer "doing whatever they want", even if that is technically true by some definition of "want", and even if the lawyer's rationalization of this is found to be internally inconsistent, or inconsistent with some other aspect of their behavior.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> the only in bounds way to convince me to change my mind about them is to show me that my beliefs are inconsistent Have you not examined your beliefs at all? No 100% consistent belief system has even been invented, because the different principles that allow advanced society to exist conflict with each other - duty to the collective, freedom, equality, etc. Should the tolerant, tolerate people who are Nazis? Should people be forced to serve in the army against their will to defent freedom? Should you have the freedom to choose the more expensive lawyer, and if so should the law apply equally to the rich and the poor? the examples go on forever.

ouid 4y ago
It's trivially easy to create a consistent belief system. Simply have no beliefs. The mutually exclusive properties are consistency and completeness (although these can be mutually satisfied in certain limited circumstances not likely to be relevant here). You can have no belief at all about abortion. In that case, you are free to choose one as an axiom, although you are also free to not choose. If you choose a belief about abortion as an axiom and the result is that you end up believing both a thing and its negation, then you will need to abandon one of the necessary premises for that construction.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > It's trivially easy to create a consistent belief system. Simply have no beliefs The point of a belief system is to be of practically usefull in life, not to.. whatever are we achieving here exactly?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]