I listened to Stefan’s thirty-third podcast, and was both
pleased and slightly embarrassed to find my third point discussed further. But my objection was not assuaged, and maybe
it’s because I have yet to get to the appropriate podcast, or maybe it’s that
I’m mischaracterizing Stefan’s point.
Let me give it a shot. In
biology, the definition of a horse is not truly concrete. In other words, horses are not uniformly
identical to anything, nor do they necessarily share any particular trait in
common. I really hate to keep bringing
up Buddhism, but it reminds me of a famous argument in which a Buddhist monk
was talking to a King about his royal chariot.
“If we remove one of the wheels and put a different one on, would it
still be your chariot?” To which the
King responded that it would. “If we
switch the tongue, or the roof, or the axle, then would it still be your
chariot?” The King affirmed, and the
discussion continued until the monk had convinced the king that there was in
fact nothing about the chariot that identified it as itself. We can apply the same argument to a horse, in
that a horse with two heads, or an extra vertebra, or a hairless tail, could
still be a horse (I’m not sure exactly when a biologist would declare it to be
a new species). This is only true
because there’s nothing that concretely defines a horse. And of course, this doesn’t mean that the
concept of a horse is useless. I agree
with Stefan to that point.
But when he talks about the rules of human behavior, he
claims that the justification for a moral principle is that all humans prefer
it, but at the same time seems to assert that if not precisely all humans
prefer it, that the rule can still be used.
To analogize, he appears to be saying that if all humans do not want to
die, murdering is wrong. He acknowledges
that some human might want to die, and is not courageous enough to kill himself
or even make it known that he prefers this.
However, this individual’s existence does not eliminate the usefulness
of claiming that all humans prefer to live. Accordingly, a murderer is always wrong in
killing someone, because her victim would always prefer to live.
However, it appears that if we allow that her victim might want
to die, then we have destroyed the universality of the principle. The entire truth of the argument seems to be
contingent on it being the case that the murderer has done something to her
victim that no human would want. Is
Stefan’s point that even if some humans would prefer to be murdered, that it is
still best to operate as if these individuals did not exist, and simply make
the rule that murder is wrong? This
seems agreeable enough. But if this is
the case, would it be immoral to kill someone who wanted to be murdered? I would argue that it is not, and I don’t
think that Stefan would disagree.
If we argue that it is not immoral to kill someone who
agrees that murdering them would be acceptable, what is the status of Stefan’s
claims regarding soldiers? Is it not the
case that becoming a soldier serves as a declaration that murder is not immoral
if one’s murderer comes from a different “team,” as he would do the same to
them? If we allow this, does that form
the basis for an argument for contextual morals? Does it not seem that what Stefan is arguing
is based on preferences which do not arise from humanity itself? If a soldier can prefer a rule that says, “I
would prefer to kill members of the opposing “team” if and only if they have
declared an identical preference,” then it does not seem that we can say that a
soldier is committing an immoral act by murdering members of the opposing
“team.” Accordingly, the immorality of
murder does not seem to reflect a universal human preference, because this
would imply that soldiers would generally hold this preference. It rather strikes me that the immorality of
murder reflects the almost universally preferred behavior of the group of
people to whom it applies: civilians. Of
course, it could be argued that soldiers would not prefer what they do if they
knew something that civilians, or Stefan, knows. But that’s a discussion for another day.
The thirty third podcast also somewhat addresses my first
point in its discussion of the example of a thief. I agree with Stefan in saying that a thief
could most definitely not argue that he has the right to steal, because, to
bring up Nathaniel Branden’s stolen concept argument, the concept of theft
presupposes the existence of property rights.
A thief’s argument could not be that his theft was justified, and that
he also had the right to keep his stolen property. What he could argue, however, is that there
is no moral right which applies to property, and that his taking of someone else’s
property was as allowable as it would be for someone to do the same to him. In other words, to argue in favor of theft
would be to speak gibberish, but to argue that taking is not theft would be
consistent.
Stefan argues that someone would not take something if they
did not assume that they would be able to use what they took for
themselves. In his example, a car thief
would not bother to steal a car if she believed that someone could just take it
away from her immediately. But this is
not necessarily the case. It would be
sufficient that she expect that she would likely be able to use the car, and
that the chances of being stolen from herself were not too great. To give a more accessible example, a hungry
bread thieving pauper might be able to justify eating someone else’s bread by
saying that no one should go hungry, and that if he had uneaten bread, he would
not mind if someone ate it. Clearly he
would have to expect that between picking up the piece of bread, chewing it up,
and digesting it, no one would steal the bread away from him. But this does not seem like an unreasonable
expectation to me.
To address Nathan’s initial question: I’m obviously not
saying that rape is the same as wearing a mismatching outfit, but rather I’m
saying that Stefan’s argument is insufficient because it does not account for
the differences in these things.
To address his second post, in which he said, “By claiming
the opponent is in error one automatically must be disagreeing and taking a
position contrary to the opponent”: I
agree. What I’m saying is that Stefan’s
argument is, “(for all x) Ax,” and my argument need not be “~Ax.” All I need to do is demonstrate that “(there
exists x) Ax.” Therefore, while I can
not say, “I do not value truth, therefore you are wrong,” I can say, “It is not
necessarily true that humans value truth, and there exist contrary examples,
therefore you are wrong.” But I have not
listened to podcast 555 yet, so if my error is covered there, despite the subsequent
statement by Impaler, then I apologize.
Nathan’s fourth post claims that “Nutrition is UPB
[universally preferred behavior]…” I
would agree if nutrition were simply an option on an order form that one could
check or not check. Of course the
overwhelming majority of people want to be healthy. But the fact is, many people who are fully
informed about what would make them healthy still choose not to do those
things. This would suggest that
nutrition is not universally preferred; its costs outweigh its benefits to a
many people.
Stefan’s later point that there can be no universally
preferred, amoral behavior is critical, as he is defining morality as
universally preferred behavior. It
appears that to reject this identification is to reject the entire system.
I apologize for the fact that this post is approaching epic
proportions. I’ll try to be more concise
in the future. And I'll get to those other podcasts as quickly as possible.