Things I believe for no reason Vol II, Chap II

[jack]

I know it's been a while since Chap I, but I've always had something else to do, and last night I started thinking about this again. I had been expecting to go on a while longer discussing occams razor and scientific methods, but I've found I'm more interested in moral stuff atm.

I believe some notation is in order before I can progress. I think a large number of arguments arise though the use of innacurate terminology, where a concept is very different to define, but everyone knows what it is, but two people have slightly different ideas about it, and don't realise that, and assume they disagree, whereas in actual fact they're just describing the same thing in two ways.

I'll start with a hopefully non-controversial example I borrowed from some authorial mathematician. Anna is facing a tree which Bill is hiding behind. She slowly sidesteps, walking all the way round the tree, which however Bill keeps between them. Question: has Anna walked around Bill? Colin says no, they were facing each other the whole time. Dulce says yes, Anna walked a circle which Bill was always inside. I hope you can see that both people have a reasonable claim, and since they're answering 'yes' and 'no' to the same question, feel they disagree. If you don't give me that, I hope you can imagine a similar situation where they would. Please don't argue with the example unless you feel no example would suffice.

The key point is that the word 'around' is ambiguous. This isn't bad: all words can vary in meaning slightly, that's how language works[1]. But in this case we need to be aware of it. Colin and Dulce are describing the same event, but are using the word 'around' in slightly different ways[2]. I say they should then use slightly more precise words, and find they agree after all.

Of course, in real life the situation is complicated by people disagreeing fundamentally, but we should at least know what each person says with little trouble, and hopefully the true disagreements will then be much more evident, and hence tractable[3].

For the purposes of my posts on these subjects, I propose two new terms related to belief, that will also apply to other related words such as "know" and "fact" and "true":

moral-belief: Belief that something is right, desirable, good, etc. Eg. "I moral-believe that you shouldn't steal."

factual-belief: Belief that something is true, or exists. Eg. "I factual-believe that the earth is solid."

Further division would be made for other arguments, for instance, degrees of certainty in factual-beliefs, or belief as in "a factual-belief held without evidence"[4], or belief as in "trust in or give thanks to someone".

Probably someone else has a better word for these concepts, either a better english word or phrase, or some greek words which are traditionally used in philosophy. Please enlighten me :)

[1] Someone once told me a wonderful analogy: words are like nodes in net, and we use the word *nearest* our meaning. Thus shifting meanings can make the language more expressive, whilst never completely precise.

[2] Mathmos may like to consider 'around' as meaning prescribing a curve of looping number one about the origin in a coordinate system which places the other person there. The ambiguity is that Dulce assumes the coordinates are fixed relative to the tree, and Colin assumes they are fixed relative to one of the people.

[3] I have a perhaps wrong but almost idealisticly held to idea that it's better to understand ourselves and each other, and if we do our differences can be easily solved. Obviously in many specific cases this is wrong, but all the same it will probably make it into Vol III :)

[4] This crops up in religious arguments. I factual-believe pluto isn't made of kittens, but someone says that that belief isn't 'fact' because it's open to being changed by the evidence. Then we should have different words for those. I'd say all facts (ie. things I factual-believe) are open to challenge, though there is a range: facts about observable things are more certain than facts about long-dead things, for instance, and facts about logic and reason we have to accept before we can admit the concept of evidence.

Comments

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Ice-cream (factually-)is unhealthy

That's kind of dubious too. I bet you could get very guarded statements, like "eating nothing but icecream (factually-)makes you fat", but then going from that to "fat people are unhealthy" is very hard work.

In fact I think your distinction is not a moral / factual one, its a measurable / unmeasurable one*. So is the earth flat, is now quite easilly measurable. Are people fat, is quite measurable. Are people unhealthy is harder, because you have to define unhealthy, and then measure it.

like take "women are worse at maths than men", which you wouldn't want to say was a "moral" claim, but also isn't a "factual" claim, really. You could say "women (factual- )do worse in the maths tripos" etc etc etc... "societies with more theft (factual** - ) have people with more debt" but the problem is when you start trying to use words like worse, or bad, that can't be measured.

In fact this reminds me a lot of the equality of sin debate I had with Chess years ago, which I now can't find. But the point was we agreed lots of points were true, that the thing in debate was "further from gods plan as expressed in the bible", "more harmful for the people doing it" etc etc etc, but not that it was "more bad".

*This was quite a eureka moment when I typed it.

** I have no idea if it is, but shrug. *Something* must be true about societies with more theft

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think measurable/non-measurable *is* a vital distinction and one I wished I'd thought about in other arguments, but I don't think it's the one I was trying to make here.

Look at my original example. I say some things are WRONG. Some other things may or may not be wrong because we don't know enough, but I don't think that devalues the idea. So, for instance:

Factual (in my sense): ice-cream is cold.
Moral (in my sense): dying early is bad
Factual but false: ice-cream is hot.
Factual and probably true but we're not sure: Eating *too much* ice-cream will make you fat, and more likely to die young.
Moral and probably true but we're not sure: Therefore eating *too much* icecream is a (morally-)bad thing to do.

Does that make any more sense?

[mair_in_grenderich]

facts are things that you believe there is one truth and people believe in it or not, and morals are things where there is no right or wrong, and people believe *something* based on information and their own heads?

so both might change given more information, etc, but even with perfect information people's morals might differ? except with perfect information it might be obvious what the absolute 'right' and 'wrong' are?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Basically, yes.

except with perfect information it might be obvious what the absolute 'right' and 'wrong' are?

I had assumed there couldn't be an absolute right and wrong[1], but I think I've been too hasty. Hmmm.

[1] Imagine you could see or change anything in the universe. I don't see how that tells you how to behave in moral quandries, even if you can avoid them by omipotenting them away.

[mair_in_grenderich]

I'm suggesting that it /might/ be the case that if you could correctly see through /all/ the consequences of some action, *everyone* would come to the same conclusion about whether that action should be performed or not.

It might not be the case, of course. That would depend on what the "perfect information" is, and we'd need perfect information to know that.

(for example, suppose the existence of heaven and hell ... )

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

OK, I can see we *might*.

But I was thinking that in most cases we'd disagree about what were desirable outcomes. Suppose we all had perfect information, and could create in the far future an almost perfectly happy society -- or an almost perfectly just society. Even if we knew what would happen, would we choose the same way?

[mair_in_grenderich]

ok, so now we're in an area where the distinction is one of agreement-given-perfect-information. However, without the perfect information, you can't tell which issues fall into which category... ?

so in fact when you say moral-belief and factual-belief, you mean

things which you (er factual-believe? moral-believe?) think that people will agree on, given 'sufficient' information (in which increasing the information cannot change their beliefs) and

things which you think that people need not agree on, given 'sufficient' information (in reverse order)?

(or... things which you think that people would agree that they would agree on if they had sufficient information?)

yeep. this is fun.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Doh! Yes, I think you've pinpointed a problem.

I'd made some assumptions other people would disagree with, invalidating these terms for them. I still think they're possible, but not necessarily useful -- eg. people who believe in absolute morality wouldn't feel the distinction as necessary.

Also, doh, sorry I have to go. I'll respond fully tomorrow.

[mair_in_grenderich]

hm, maybe you ought to start a new post before things disappear deep in wodges of comments.

I don't think it's a problem, necessarily, but it seems to me the case that by those definitions, some people would factual-believe something which others only moral-believe, and there's nothing you can do about it except get deep into unwinnable arguments over the borderline cases ;) Now, which kind of belief do you use to assign decisions on whether something is factual-belief or moral-belief? [I say, factual belief]

(I like this, jack posts about how we don't need to argue as long as we define terms properly, so we launch into an argument over the definition of terms, which is just what you were trying to avoid, no?)

* and the computational resources to make use of it, which I guess relates to your "practically unmeasurable" below.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

But I think it's better to have this argument here, when we *know* we're trying to define something, than to have it later when we mistakenly believe our disagreement is about what we believe :)

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I still think the "is this a measurable idea" is the point.

And I've realised an interesting ambiguity in that wrong and right are not the same as true and false

If a concept is measurable, then it can, with the right measuring, be proved factually true or false. So for "foo is bar" - if the barness of foo is a measurable concept, the hotness of icecream, the fatness of icecream eaters, the trueness or falseness of the statement is always factual. It is odd to want to say a statement is wrong when it is true. I think my "what you eat affects how you think and act" is a nice fuzzy one for you to think about here - it's meaasurable, it does make a difference (just take the limits ;-) ) and it is true. But it feels so so wrong to me... ;-) But even though I want it (in some sense morally) to be wrong, I would never build a moral code about its wrongness because it is a Fact about the world that we can observe and measure to be true

The point being we can't agree on a definition of badness, so we can't measure it, so it's not measureable, so it falls under your "moral-fact"ness

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Aha! Good point.

How about measurable, *practically* unmeasurable and *intrinsically* unmeasurable.

We might disagree about the inside of a black hole, or history, or what effects foo has on society, because we can't know for sure, so their factuality varies between 'true' and 'maybe' and 'false'.

However, some things we can *never* prove, only decide, such as if foo is evil.

(However, on thought, some people think there are universal morals. OTOH, they can't prove it, merely assert it afaik.)

[atreic.livejournal.com]

some things we can *never* prove, only decide, such as if foo is evil.

See, I want to argue with that. Not because of universal morality, but because I think that evil has a meaning. Although the OED has let me down and defined it as "The antithesis of Good" :-) Sadly, it probably has lots of meanings, and people can argue at cross purposes without realising this. So lets give a few examples, perhaps "evil: a thing that makes people unhappy" Well, this is measurable. At least in as much as people know their own happiness. We may not get it right, but we could get a sample population, kill half their families, and then ask them if they were happy or not, and if they said they weren't we could conclude that killing people's families was "this sort of evil". Or "evil: a thing that makes God unhappy" We could read the Bible, and the books of lots of other religions, and we could argue that there was measurable evidence that god was against killing. or we could argue there was evidence that god was very pro-killing. But there is stuff available to us when we try to work out if killing people is "this sort of evil". It may be practically impossible to know everything to do with god, and nothing may be proovable, but there are a lot of general things we can consult and study to look for trends. Whether or not God is anti-killing is not something we just have to guess. Whether or not killing makes people unhappy is not something we just have to guess.

There's a fuzzyness here, because there's mathematicians proof and historians / scientists proof. But we crossed a lot of those lines when we said things like "Ice cream makes people fat" or "Hitler hated Jews" which I think were both factual-truths, not moral-truths in your ideas. If you take "Hitler hated Jews" as a factual truth you can sort of see the case for "God hates killing people" being a factual-truth - there is (may be) a large body of writings and revalations that support it, and not many opposed... (???)

So if we pin down evil to a definition, then it's sort-of measurable. Or at least investigatable. So the interesting conclusion is if there are some words that are not fully definable - that we *know* what they mean, but can't say it. Intrinstically meaningless (or of meta-meaning) making them intrinsically unmeasurable

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Defining evil sounds very like what my next popst was going to be about, would you be awfully offended if I didn't reply to it now, but waited for that? (In summary I'd like to, but didn't succeed.)

OTOH, Person A would drop litter. Person B wouldn't. Sometimes they've a different perception of how much that affects society, but I think a lot of the time B cares and A doesn't.

*That's* the distinction I want to make. Both might agree litter was slightly evil, but they demonstatably disagree about how evil it is in terms of what they *do*.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Yes... this fits in perfectly with my other comment - it's what they care about, what they're personally interested in. Person A thinks that not bothering to find a bin and getting on with their life in a messy park is more interesting then having a fractionally shorter time in a clean park... that the one piece of litter isn't worth the effort of finding a bin. And person B thinks that it is.

Or, alternatively (thinking outside the box here) they just don't get cause and effect. I think that's a big problem with a lot of people s actions.

So what we need to do is drum into people some important stuff when they're little, and then it will be important to them and they'll act on it. Fuzzy "do whatever you want" is very good and tolerant, but if people think that nothing is important beyond having nice food and clothes then well, they'll act like that. Duty and Honour and The Love of God made much better people, even if they were, err, fundamentally wrong about lots of stuff????

I wait anxiously for your next bit of free time :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes. I do think everyone has their own idea of what they should do, and have to respect, and most especially understand that, but that doesn't mean I don't accept that (1) sometimes someone else's idea is so different you have to lock them up or make war on them and (2) we should try to *form* people's opinions into something (imho) decent. To a large extent society is designed to make people's selfish immediate goals (eg. not getting fined) coincide with everyone's longer term goals (eg. having a nice park).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

*thinks*

I think the distinction comes when I'm deciding what to do. I can know height, temperature, location, healthiness, beauty, etc, of everything and still not know what to do. What I need to know is which action is *morally right*. I may need to know the other things to decide that, but look at a chain of logic leading up to a decision.

If I eat the icecream it will taste good.
Tasting good will make me happy.
Therefore I should eat the icecream.

Why didn't the chain of logic extend to infinity? Because it stopped at a 'should' statement. Those are the ones I meant to call moral- ones.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Hmm, reading this, and reading your comment to flurble about how if we were all perfectly informed we wouldn't make the same decisions, makes me think that the real crunch of where people disagree (and this is *obvious* now!) is that they give things different values. It's *what you like* So the evil stuff, if "pleasing god" is what you like doing / think is important then your definition of what actions are evil will be weighted subtly differently to the person who thinks that "making everyone happy" is more important. When you eat the icecream you make a snap judgement that for you the pleasure and immediate happiness of eating the icecream is worth the effort to exercise off the calories, or the stigma of being fat. And there probably isn't a right or a wrong in this... it's just *what you want to do*. People want to do different things.

If there was a point to the universe (be it God or otherwise) you could work towards the "right answer" and whims that took you away from it would be bad, and whims that took you towards it would be good, and you get an absolute morality that mortals justhaven't worked out yet. But if there is no point, people make up their own meanings of life... and its where "what's important" differs that the different moralities begin

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's exactly where I was going in my next-but-one post, but you said it so much better!

And yes, I need to go think about absolute morality. Back in 16 hours...

Doh! I'm afraid I have to go now before giving this the response it deserves, but thank you for responding, I'll be back in the morning.