Conceptual ontology

When people propose a theory, an important question I think is to ask what kind of force they expect their theory to have. My interest here is ontological, so I am interested in what kind of thing their theory is purporting to be.

What is a theory? I define it to be a system of ideas that are intended to explain something. Theories usually have some kind of more universal property: whilst we might use theory to explain practical phenomena, theories have a level of abstraction above the immediate phenomena. As a basic example, we might wonder why it is wrong to kill a woman. Our theory of morality would provide an explanation, perhaps in terms of rights, utility or what not. Our theory however seems to tell us more: the fact that it is a woman seems irrelevant, in fact our moral theory might explain that it is wrong to kill any human.

Explanation is a non trivial topic. What counts as an explanation? Well on some level we would expect an explanation to be something that offers value in our thinking: it helps us understand things and perhaps helps us decide how to behave. On another level, we expect an explanation to reveal the true nature of things: it lets us perceive the objective reality. In an ideal world these would coincide: all theories would purport to refer to the objective reality, and our theory helps our perception of it, thus providing us with action guidance and understanding. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case: a literary analysis whilst illuminating may not refer to the objective reality. We might think this is the case because there is no inherent object being referred to by the analysis, we can not pick out a real thing to say that the analysis is about. Instead the analysis or theory is there to present an interesting idea; to give us insight and understand perhaps what the author was thinking.

Other times, our theories generally do try and explain the world. Our theories of atoms purport that reality is really such that it has atoms, even if we cannot perceive them. Our theories of natural selection claims that the process of biological change is governed by an overarching principle, and that this is the way the world behaves. 

The important thing here seems to be the difference between the mind independent and the mind dependent. Theories are of value for both, but it is important to establish the distinction. If a theory is mind independent that the theory is in some sense externally valuable because it attempting to access reality. If a theory is mind dependent then the value is entirely internal, it depends on us being able to think and understand. 

I've suggested here that mind independent theories have some kind of special status. I want to explicate what I mean here. If a theory is mind independent and purporting to reflect reality then this provides us with some kind of ontology of theories. These theories actually are trying to grab hold of the world. These theories are especially important because assuming the world exists, the development of these theories genuinely allow us more and more access to the world. Because the world is a specific system with rules and laws, we expect a degree of logical consistency. Thus if a theory is viewed as correct and / or as of value, it can be in some sense easily measured against the other mind independent theories.

The mind dependent theories have a weaker ontology since they don't have the objective reality to connect themselves to. Instead they operate inside our mind. They offer ways for us to think about things without necessarily purporting that reality is as they say. This lack of committment is inherently weaker, because our ability to evaluate these theories are in some sense limited to other mind dependent arguments. 

Now it is very important for people to clarify the ontology of their theories. The example that I am quite interested in is questions about gender. For example suppose we have a theory of gender in which transexual people exist. Perhaps our theory tells us that one's assigned gender can be distinct from one's actual gender. This is characterised by the idea that you are a woman in a man's body. Now we have an important question: what is the ontology of this theory?

If the theory is meant to the mind independent ontology then we expect that there is this genuine concept of gender somewhere in reality. That is that there is some kind of switch or indicator (perhaps that we cannot epistemically access) that says whether a person has gender male or gender female or neither. Because we think the world is logically consistent, we think that there must be a true theory of gender out there; some objective and decisive way of understand these concepts. If you're telling me that people's real gender is what they identify with, then you'd be saying that there actually exists some kind of mechanism in reality (even if we cannot access) that takes self identification as a means to establish the switch.

If in comparison the theory has the mind dependent ontology, then it is saying something rather different. The theory of gender is then just a way for us to understand society, to understand certain phenomena. For practical purposes, this might not be so bad, in fact perhaps this is enough. However one might think we lose some element of justification. The mind dependent ontology just seems to lack the concreteness of the mind independent ontology since we don't purport there to be any objective tests of validation. That is, there would be no way for anyone to really prove it wrong, even in principle.

Now I'm sure we will face some confusion here so I want to emphasise two points.

First, the ontology is distinct from the theoretical provability. I can have a theory of mathematics that says there are abstract objects that I cannot access. I couldn't prove their existence, yet my theory still claims that they are there. It claims that the things we talk about genuinely refer to an objective reality. Thus philosophical and non empirical arguments can very much have mind independent ontologies. It's not necessarily about the ability to verify, its about whether the theory is purporting to describe the objective reality.

The second point is in terms of normativity. Suppose I say something like 'killing is wrong'. This is a normative claim because I am assessing what is good or what is bad. Now what is important here is what my 'good' or 'badness' is in reference to. If I am a moral realist I might think that the use of 'wrong' here is because I purport that reality genuinely has concepts of right and wrong, and that killing has the property of wrongness. Good and bad exists in our objective reality, and I have access to it.

Compare this to a claim like 'You should call people by their preferred pronoun'. We can identify here another sense of morality, that it would be wrong not to do so. However we can do this whilst remaining agnostic about the ontology of the theory of gender. That is, we can accept it because we think its nice to do what people ask of us, without having to accept some underlying theory that people have the gender of their preferred pronoun. Consider the example 'you should think 2 +2 =4'. Perhaps I think the theory of number does not refer to actual reality, but instead is mind dependent - it just offers a good and valuable way to think about plurality. In that case, I should still think that 2+2=4, but my reason to do so is not because 2 exists in our objective reality, but instead dependent us valuing concepts such as rationality. Whether or not a theory of rationality has a mind independent ontology is another interesting question. I'm inclined to think not, but that doesn't mean it lacks value.

So when people come up with theories about the world, ask them what the ontology of their theory is. Is their theory genuinely trying to purport that the world is a certain way, in a mind independent sense? Or are they just offering a useful way to think about reality?

Regarding the racism incidents in the Dota Dreamleague minor

Been reading some of the comments on this page, just want to raise some thoughts about how to see the issue. Also, to respond to some of the arguments and rebuttals. I think it's good to have an actual conversation on these matters and that its important that these things are brought to light.

First our context - what happened?

In a recent competitive match during the dreamleague minor (a valve sponsored event), a player - Skem - on team complexity made a racial comment - "Ching chong" - against the Chinese team, RNG.

After the event, Skem posted an apology, and team complexity punished him with a fine.

A few days later, during a pub game, a TNC player - Kuku - made the same comment in a pub. When this was brought to light he claimed that his comment was in reference to a player on his opposing team who just killed him. It was later found that this player only changed their name after the incident and thus his explanation was invalid.

Soon after, we see a major Chinese backlash. Team LGD state that they refuse to play scrim with TNC, a number of chinese talents and players expressing outrage against the incideits. Some talents/players actively demanding that Valve take action.

Today we see cases of 'review bombing' in Steam against Dota 2, with some of these reviews themselves contain racial comments and degoratory remarks.

Some thoughts about racism:

There are different ways to define racism. The two common ideas however seem to be:

1. The negative treatment of an individual based on their race, ethnicity, skin colour etc.

2) The idea that society is structured in a way that negatively affects certain groups, either institutionally, intentially or unintentionally.

I'm not going to comment on which one is the correct usage. Regardless, in both definitions people tend to see racism as something that negatively affects groups such as Black, asian, hispanic and such groups. A thing to note that under the second definition, if white people are viewed as the priviledged group, then they are unable to experience racism. In contrast, if we use the first definition, they can experience it, for example if a interviewer refused to hire white people. These definitions can also be context dependent. For example in other countries, the cases of racial discrimination, and structural discrimination can affect different groups. Whilst we tend to evaluate how 'racist' something is using our own context, we should be aware that it can differ for other people.

This is important just as a cautionary warning: we should be careful with comparing degrees of racism. I've seen this argument a number of times now where people compare the usage of 'Ching chong' with the 'N' word. I've also seen a number of rebuttals claiming that the cases are not comparable. You have to recognise that in some sense you are saying that the purported racism experienced by Chinese people is not as bad as the racism experienced against Black people. One might bring up arguments about a history of slavery to indicate why one term is worse than the other. Making such arguments however you should also think about the treatment of China across history. There have certainly been some fairly destructive cases such as the Opium war.

It might also be cited that 'ching chong' is meant only to mock the language. We should again be careful here: one might think that when dealing with structural racism, what matters is the intention of expressing such derogatory remarks, as opposed to what said remarks reference. Part of the issue is that the negative effects of racism may not be entirely obvious. Bringing up cases of history or even statistics may provide you indicators, but if we were to take a structural conception of racism then the issue also lies in the small things: the acceptance of casual racist remarks, the willingness to make insensitive jokes and so on. Another thing to note is that you're also acting in different contexts: you might be thinking about racial relations within a country in North America or Europe, but others may see it from in China. They might for example look back at a history of the West taking advantage of China, and see these racial comments as referring to such a history.

Should Valve take action?

I think we have an agreement that Racism is bad, I don't think this needs to be argued. It should also be agreed that racism has no place in gaming. We might now consider two seperate cases. The Skem case occurred in a valve sponsored minor. In this sense, there is certainly an argument to expect Valve to comment or take action. A lack of response might indicate a sense of tolerance of racist behaviours. We note that the Kuku case is certainly different. Skem acts as some kind of valve representative in the sense that they publically invited him to play in a special tournament. Kuku in comparison was playing in a pub. There actions are both wrong of course, but if they are to take action, it should be against Skem. I think the Chinese reaction against the two cases is not to see them as identical, but to see Kuku's case as just evidence of repeated casual racism, and a frustration at that.

Now Valve do tend not to comment on these issues in general, and I don't think they necessary need to actively punish Skem right now. If the situations are important enough, Valve respond. Thus if they do not comment in this case (in their own event) when there is such public backlash this certainly is a PR risk (and arguably indicates an over tolerance for such racist behavior). I think that Valve should say that looking forward that racism in their sponsored events (at least) would not be tolerated.

Regarding the Chinese reaction

The first point is that racism should be taken seriously. It seems in some sense that it's the victims discretion in terms of how seriously they should take it. If I discriminate against you in a certain case, in a public setting it doesn't seem like you should be forced to tolerate it. You should have the right to react in the appropriate manner.

Racial remarks from Chinese reviewers:

This is obviously wrong. If you are a victim of racial discrimination, then you clearly see it as problematic. Presumably you should also see that it is the action itself that is wrong, not necessarily just who the victim is (ref to def 1). For certain Chinese reviewers to make such comments is morally unacceptable.

Hypocrisy:

Something to note is that whilst hypocrisy doesn't seem to be a good thing, this does not even out any arguments. Just because someone may be racist themselves does not mean that them being victims or racial discrimination is right. Certainly we can have many issues with things such as Chinese nationalism, racism and comments. By no means should we think of them as saints. We would be right to call out bad behvaiour. However this does not mean somehow weaken the unjust behaviour inflicted upon the Chinese.

I do hope that these incidents also cause everyone to rethink how they treat each other regarding Racism. That includes certain Chinese people reflecting on how they treat people of other races, and how such behaviour is morally unacceptable.

TLDR:

1. case is complex
2. racism is bad,
3. two wrongs dont make a right,
4. looking forward Valve should not tolerate racism in their events.
5. 
   

Factive expression and recognising opinion

In this post I want to discuss some phenomena in terms of how ideas are presented. I want to talk about how certain arguments are misleading because they are presented as a factive expression.

A factive expression is an expression that encapulates a proposition and presents the underlying proposition as factive, i.e. is the truth. Examples of factive expressions are 'inform', 'explain'. So 'x informs y that p' implies that p is a fact, that it is a true proposition. If someone explains to me that q, then I'd assume that q is true.

One underlying issue is that factive expressions seem to imply that the agent has knowledge. So for x to inform y that p seems imply that x knows that p, and then we might think the truth of p comes from the factivity of knowledge. We know that knowledge is a complicated topic, and that we doubt in many instances that we actually have knowledge. For example when we making claims about the external world, that I have hands, this seems to rely on an assumption that we aren't dreaming or in some kind of matrix. We cannot entirely eliminate this possibility and it still seems we can make knowledge assertions, but we shoudl just have this possibility in the back of our mind.

Explain is often used when discussing mathematical facts. For example I might explain to my friend how there are infinitely many primes owing to a certain proof. Yet even here we must make some implicit assumptions about infinity and what a prime is. We seem to even require assumptions about proof and logic. This doesn't make mathematics redundant. It is just important that mathematicians have an underlying awareness of this. That what they view as the truth seems to require certain assumptions about the world.

Where it seems to get messy is when we discuss social sciences or the humanities. The thing we need to emphasise is the status of what backs our views if we wish to use factive expressions concerning them. In philosophy it is important to emphasise that when expressing a view, it is just that, a way of viewing the world. Just like mathematics it requires many underlying assumptions. It might certainly be the best way of explaining certain phenomena, but we should be rather careful in assuming it to be a fact. There's a certain instability of these views in its subjectivity, compared to physical facts which we might think to be close to the truth (but still requiring assumptions that the external world exists).
Certainly we thank these academics for their views, as they offer valuable insight for us to consider. Yet we should remember that these are still views. Our choice to express these phenomena in a factive way should be because we see the underlying assumptions as justified relative to our context, not because we have certainty that the expression is truthful.

So the reason I made this post was because I saw this video online titled: These Asian and Asian American actors explain why it's important — and long overdue — for the media to reflect reality

Now let me say that I partially agree. There are certainly arguments, that I see to be of some value as to why this thesis is correct. Yet to use the factive expression of explain i find to be largely misleading. It implies that what they have said is the truth, that it's very much a fact. I mentioned that in ordinary cases of mathematics, we can express theorems such as 'there are infinitely many primes' without having to invoke our assumptions about set theory, logic, number theory. I think that is somewhat acceptable for two reasons:

1) Mathematicians on the whole seem to be aware that the truth of such claims rely on background assumptions in set theory and logic.

2) Initial set of assumptions for proof are often explicitly stated (and we demand a proof for the claim), for example defining a prime number.

The video's claim lacks these two properties. Firstly, I think it's quite likely that most people who would read such a title lack an awareness that the claim relies on a number of assumptions about race, media and so on. Secondly, the assumptions are not stated here. Thus in this context, it seems unjust to use factive expressions. Because it misleads people to genuinely think that the statement is a fact. If you want to 'explain' what someone else has said, that's fine. If you want to explain a 'theory' of media representation, that's also okay. Yet using explain without reminding the reader of subjectivity, when dealing with subjective theories I find unacceptable. Even if your theory is convincing, it discourages critical thinking since factive expressions invite comprehension as opposed to evaluation.

I do understand why they do it. It's because by expressing it as a fact you can mislead people into thinking that somehow these guys have accessed the truth. It invites everyone just to listen and follow what they've said, because you can't deny facts. This way we can achieve our political agenda. I find this incredibly dishonest however, and bad in the long run. If your theories are good and convincing, you don't need to cover them up as facts to get your point across and make an impact. I find these representation argument's actually quite interesting but presenting them as facts just makes me want to deny them.

Dialectical and the normative

I've defined the dialectical now so my objective in this post is to discuss normativity and an apparent tension that it presents for the dialectical.

The dialectical seems to work rather nicely for descriptive issues. If we have a phenomenon and we want to understand it, the dialectical helps us produce the best theory. The goal here is to simply obtain the best explanation for a phenomenon, and in this case it is natural to look at all of the available evidence and take the best one. There are certainly some issues in terms of how we can determine the 'best theory', but these issues don't seem too worrying. Scientists for example have to wonder routinely about what criterion are relevant when deciding which theory to prefer. Factors that are useful seem to be explanatory depth, ontological simplicity, predictive power and coherence with other established theories. This criterion seems to be mostly transferable to any descriptive issue. The important thing is some kind of assumption about that there is this objective world that does not care what we know about it. The valuable criterion are those that give us a best picture about this objective world given the snippets of evidence that it provides us with. The crucial thing here is that we have some kind of epistemic availability. It seems that since the world is in an objective, mind independent state there is some kind of reliability and consistency about our access to it. That is, we tend not worry that the whole thing is illusionary or that we have all just made some mistake. (Sceptical arguments might do this, but these aren't really taken seriously I think).

Now when I discussed the 'best theory' we already have some element of normativity. Normativity essentially is a discussion on what is good or bad where the goodness or badness is relative to some context. For example we might be looking for a normative theory of morality, where we ask what is good or what is bad. We might be looking for a normative theory of epistemology where we ask what sort of norms our beliefs should follow. In my previous post about the dialectical and objectivity, there is some kind of implicit assumption about normative epistemology. I have assumed that the truth is the cardinal virtue of epistemology and that this is what we seek beyond all else. I have implied that dialectical which is meant to represent objective rational thought relies on seeking accuracy and truth, and following our evidence. Now whilst I have made normative and one might think subjective committments about what rationality is, I think connecting objectivity, dialectical and truth together is reasonable. If our goal is to see this mind independent reality, it seems fairly clear that our goal is truth and how to get to the truth (evidence). If we have a different goal than objectivity, that's fine. But if we're committing to objectivity, then the dialectical truth goal seems a logical conclusion.

Now we have this challenge in terms of how to reconcile normativity (what is good) and dialectical (what is the truth). One of our issues is that normativity often requires a certain kind of epistemic access to the good. For example if we want to engage in political discussion we will tend to speak in words such as 'right, wrong, moral' and so on. These are all normative claims. However to justify them we seem to appeal to things like intuition or common sense. This leads to some serious concerns. If we want to engage in dialectical about whether abortion is morally wrong or right, we want to be seeking the truth about morality. Yet since we have some epistemic issues with accessing 'the moral', it is difficult to see how we can be objective when discussing these topics. Note this is not a ontological committment about whether morality itself is objective. Morality can be objective and we still face these issues because what we are concerned about is our epistemic access to morality. Our goal is truth but any evidence we have seems to be epistemically suspect and we cannot seem to be sure of its reliability which makes it hard for us to say if we're being objective or not.

Let's consider a specific goal for now. Consider something like freedom of speech, which is intuitively perhaps something of value. We then consider an issue such as hate speech. It is natural and is in fact commonly asked whether something like hate speech should lead one to deny claims of freedom of speech. Suppose we engage in a dialectical about this issue, we might list the win conditions as follows:

Freedom > Hate: if we can show freedom of speech overides everything, perhaps even showing value in allowing for hate speech.

Hate > Freedom: if we show that hate speech is sufficiently destructive that it should overrule freedom of speech.

Obviously it's a bit more nuanced than that and we can require definitions for each. We'd also need to say whether what sort of hate speech is so bad that it might override freedom and vice versa. We have however the bare details of such a dialectical.

Now we face a challenge here with our dialectical since at some point we kind of need an argument along the lines of 'hate speech is bad for reason X, which means it overrules our reason Y for freedom of speech'. Here the good and the bad are obviously important and are normative instead of descriptive. Certain approaches of dialectical still seem important: we of course don't engage in ad hominem and our goal is the truth. Yet it seems that seeking the truth in this context is difficult because it relies on some kind of committment to the good and the bad. 

I think this is partly what makes certain aspects of debate complicated. Whilst we want to fully engage in objective thought, certain topics require large committments to normative statements that are hard to verify given our epistemic access. It seems the best we can do is to attempt a dialectical to obtain some kind of agreed upon 'axioms' or 'premises' concerning the relevant normative concept.

Defining objectivity in terms of dialectical

I've mentioned this earlier but there is some kind of inherent difficulty with being objective. I have expressed disdain towards the political but have also suggested that maybe one is unable to fully remove the political from what they say. In my previous post I discussed the concept of dialectical win conditions and that a dialectical is a certain kind of discussion or debate that focuses on accuracy or truth. In this post I want to describe how we can use dialectical to discuss some ideas of objectivity.

What is objectivity? In philosophy it is typically used to refer to truth outside of one's own subjectivity, which is meant to remove bias from the thinker. For example we might think that it is an objective fact that there exists a city called London. In this sense, objectivity has many links with realism. In fact, one might define realism as referring to an independent, objective reality that is mind independent. That is, where the truth of things do not depend on the epistemic states of thinkers.

One of the main goals of rationality seems to be to ensure objectivity and seek out this objective reality. That is, what we believe and what we do should ideally be optimal with respect to the truth. As an example, we should believe what seems to best fit the evidence we have, where the concept of evidence is taken more loosely to include both factual information but also different arguments. The reason we follow our evidence is because we might think that evidence is the thing that best leads us to the truth. Now we recall that the dialectical goal is to have a discussion where our aim is to seek this truth. Where we are not concerned about motivations such as 'being right' or the political impacts of having the discussion. It is natural then to link together the concept of a dialectical with objectivity.

Now something to note is that discussions have different purposes. That is, the discussion not only seeks accuracy. For example, we might think that certain political discussions are often veiled with some kind of moral or political goal. Politicians are limited in what they can say because their presentations and debates are not dialectical. They need to win and convince the people and thus they also often have a rhetorical goal.

A second notion of objectivity often relates to some kind of measure or objective. For example, we might think of statistics as objective, whilst our interpretation of statistics can be subjective. There are different measures, perhaps the most obvious being monetary or quantity. For example how much an average man in the UK is paid, or how many women have abortions each year. We also might however think that things like utility or happiness can also be measures. This leads us to a slightly different way of thinking; where the purpose of our discussion is to try and maximise some kind of concept in which we cannot precisely measure, but have intuition about. For example, the goal of my conversation with friends might be for enjoyment (which we may not be able to measure) and thus certain things might deliberately be false. Or I might have a conversation for the intellectual thrill, and then I might emphasise maxing out these aspects. Here, objectivity just is with respect to optimising a certain factor.

One issue we might have is to separate the accuracy goal from other objective goals. For example if we are having a discussion about morality, e.g. whether abortion is permissible. We might attempt to have a dialectical, where we say that the thing we want above all is the truth on the issue. However when we attempt to make arguments about abortion, we may have to appeal to our intuitions about morality, which is a naturally emotive subject. In fact these themselves will often be used as arguments themselves. This may lead to some kind of tension. To avoid this, we must be rather careful with our emotions in determining where our arguments are coming from. If we are engaging in a dialectical, then even when dealing with arguably emotive concepts such as morality, we should recognise where are emotions are coming from and keep in mind the overall goal is the truth.

The main benefit of seeing objectivity in terms of the dialectical is it provides us with some kind of measure of seperating the 'political'. Even when having these difficult political or moral conversations we are able to justifiably say things for the purpose of obtaining the truth. At the same time, it also makes the purpose of discussion clear. If someone forces you to police what you mean (you should plausibly police your presentation of what you mean), then this can aid you in showing that they might not be looking towards the same goal of accuracy, and make clear that their approach may not be rational.

Dialectical win conditions

When I was studying at university, my lecturers always emphasised the concept of dialectic. Roughly speaking, this refers to having a conversation between different views. So for example if I opposed abortion, I would need to consider the arguments for pro abortion views, essentially having some kind of imaginary argument between a proponent and denier of abortion. In philosophy, dialectic is a very good thing. We're told to present the views of all sides in a charitable way, and to best represent the opponent when engaging in dialectic. For example we shouldn't misrepresent what they say, and we should take their argument in the strongest vein possible. Furthermore, what is important is typically the argument itself, as opposed to who it is that supports the argument. In this way, we tend to avoid cases of ad-hominem.

The important thing in dialectic however appears to be that the prize is truth. The reason we engage in the dialectic is because we want to know what is right. There is no shame in switching sides if we discover through this argument that the position we originally were in favour of is unable to deal with a given counter argument. Now the goal of truth we tend to think of as a valuable one, but it is clearly not the goal of all debates. In certain debates (for example competitive debating) the challenge might be to outsmart the opponent and to convince people of a given conclusion. One doesn't need to engage in fallacies to do this, few cases are black or white and one can make a strong argument in favour of either side. 

At first glance, if our goal of dialectic is truth, then it would seem strange to refer to a dialectical win conditions. The issue here is that the 'winning' is not something had by a person making an argument, but instead by the side or argument itself. Many people think that the truth is non epistemic, that what is the case does not depend on what people know about it (this position is known as realism). Even to someone who denies this, they can believe in what I describe as dialectical realism; they think that the nature of rational arguments should eventually favour one position (even if it is an amalgamation of others). For this to occur however we need to describe what can make one position 'defeat' another position. So in a given dialectical, we need this idea of a dialectical win condition. Note that this does not need to be all encompassing, it could just apply to a specific point.

For example let us return to our abortion example. This is an extremely complicated position of course and there are many different strands that are important here. Let's start with one specific strand, the personhood claim (P):

P: a fetus is a person

As individuals engaging in dialectical, we should at the very beginning be neutral; until we hear reasons we should not assume is correct. We do however have intuitions, which certainly should play a part. We also think that there exists the truth regarding this claim. Not simply whether the claim is true or false, but what the actual landscape of morality in this context is. Simplifying things we might consider two sides, Pro and Den, where Pro is in favour of P and Den is against P. It is important now to define what might be required for a given side to 'win' our dialectical. The idea is similar to how we evaluate theories, scientific or otherwise. We need some kind of independent, objective conditions that we can use for evaluation that everyone agrees with so we can all determine if one side has defeated another.

For our case we might use something like the following:

Pro wins if they can come up with a plausible account of personhood that in which all foetuses fit into the account.

Con wins if they can show that accounts of personhood should not include foetuses.

This would of course require some kind of further conditions on 'what is a good account of personhood', which will itself have win conditions based on things like '1) satisfying intuitions, 2) works well with moral' and so on. 

Essentially our goal here is to find some kind conditions for theoretical success of a theory, that everyone can agree with before the dialectical has started. It is in many ways similar to John Rawls' veil of ignorance, where everyone determines what an ideal distribution is without knowing their own place in said distribution. Here everyone determines the ideal conditions for a given theory, or what it takes for a theory to be proven correct or false, before we start our argument concerning it.

Now one issue with this idea of win conditions is that it stops backpedalling, which can also be a negative. Perhaps one the debate has started one recognises certain problems that were not present in our win condition stage. Here we get a disanalogy with the veil of ignorance since we lack the same symmetry for each party. If our goal is the truth then certainly we must accept a degree of backpedalling. I don't think this is fundamentally a problem however. What the idea of the win conditions does is only to help us seek the truth. As long as our backpedalling is motivated by our truth and not our desires to win, then such backpedalling can be viewed as a good thing. It is just the same as denying a set of axioms as useful since something intuitively important cannot be proven from them.

 

The political is anti rational

I know the title can be blunt, perhaps even misleading. I do however think that this sort of post is important, for two reasons really. One is to get off my chest how much I detest certain kinds of discussion. The second is to explain an alternative method of how we should approach things.

Sentences can be loaded. What this means is that they impart implicatures; things that exist outside of the semantic content of the sentence, things that say additional, perhaps alternative information that we gain from the pragmatic context. This is obvious of course, everyone knows that the exact statement of a sentence fails to tell the whole picture. To say a sentence is loaded however suggests that there is something a bit more, something shall we say political about it.

I don't particularly know how to define political. as I'm certainly not referring to things like the government or the state. Instead, when I say political I refer to a certain standing in the space that connects morality and society. If I make a comment that is racially discriminative, said comment can be viewed as political because I am making a moral comment that specifically applies to aspects of society. I think the intertwinement is very important here. For me to say that 'murder is fine' would in most scenarios, not itself be viewed as political. However if one can relate murder to specific aspects of society, then it become a political thing. For example suppose one discovers a statistic that women are more likely to be murdered. The statement of 'murder is fine' could then be viewed as a political comment. 

Part of the issue I think is that the pragmatics of the sentence is doing a lot more than before. Previously we take each pragmatics as just saying something in the individual case. Now however, one might take the pragmatics as saying something in a wider, societal sense. I remember around five 7 years ago in one my school classes, I told the class that I trusted my Dad because I thought he was smarter than my Mum. To my surprise members of the class took it as an instance of sexism; they interpreted the pragmatics in the wider sense.

Another incident occurred to me recently, when I engaged in what I took to be a philoshopical discussion about diversity. By expressing scepticism, this was taken by an individual as actively derailing conversation and a symptom of the problem of a lack of diversity. I found this amusing, but frustrating and very much disappointing. I don't want my scepticism to be so political, I want an interesting conversation and a chance to analyse concepts. 

Those were just anecdotes anyhow, and I'm going to move onto the more abstract claim. Firstly, to make things political is not obviously a bad thing. Suppose a certain person who embraces racism, makes a racial claim X. If another person then makes the claim X, one might interpret that person also as racist. The issue here really is an inductive problem. We are unable to communicate with individuals to the extent that we can fully understand their reasoning. So we make jumps in reasoning, we add excess information to their pragmatics which lead to the political. For practicality, this can be important. One might even think that for utility purposes and consequences this is good. For if we read things in the political manner, we can develop a means to see opposing claims in a negative light, providing reasons to go against them, even if we don't deny the semantic content of their claims.

This last point is significant because it raises a point that the political can be very much anti rationalism. I like to think a normal philosophy debate as an instance of a rational discussion. I raise points, you raise points, and if something isn't clear, then we ask each other about it. Then we assess the semantic points of each of these claims. Ideally, we minimise the extent to which we rely on pragmatics to infer meaning from the other, we especially don't use pragmatics to jump to generalisations. The problem with the political is that if one embraces it, everything can become very much loaded, and discussion is very difficult. If the moment I express scepticism about diversity, I get called racist, then the argument becomes difficult to develop. How are we to understand concepts such as scepticism when the moment someone considers a counter argument, they get mocked.

Mocking in particular is a strange one. In philosophy, I believe it shouldn't really happen. We want to understand the concepts and ideas behind what we're doing. If one believes an argument fails, just provide the reason for it, simple as that. In the political, this doesn't work. Because things are loaded, individuals generally get put onto different sides. Because the consequences matter so fundamentally, variations of strawmanning are very common. Whatever you do to present your opponent as immoral or stupid. Morally speaking, this is really a classical connundrum because in terms of overall utility, maybe this is a good thing. If we frame any opposition or sceptic as immoral or stupid, then perhaps we reach our goal. We do however seem to violate a number of rights, for example we might be inclined to violate rights for speech, rights for freedom of thought. As an epistemologist, I find the latter somewhat more worrying. 

I agree that it is the nature of talk that what we say can have consequences. That we should be careful, and that things can be political. I recently had a discussion with a gaming friend of mine and requested him not to use the word 'gay' when a negative scenario occurred in the game. I recognise that the term is in fact politically loaded, and I think I did a good thing. However I think that one should also be very much open to analysing why it is bad. It doesn't help anyone to simply censor them from speech. We should analyse and look into the argument. What is it that someone is saying? What is the argument in favour of this position?

In the future I hope that these things change. It is important not to judge people too quickly, and I fear the political very much encourages this. It encourages people to label things very quickly as sexist, racist etc because it wants to make salient these features perhaps even in the name of progress. It however really discourages certain aspects of rational discussion. I much rather read things that attempt to minimise the loaded nature of bias. A discussion in a philosophical sphere where we can genuinely discuss ideas and concepts. That's what I want. We just need to find a balance.

Cheryl's birthday and Dynamic Epistemic logic

Compared to the majority of my posts that focus on political philosophy and ethics, this post will be much more lighthearted. I'm writting my dissertation on dynamic epistemic logic and thought it would be fun to discuss some applications. In particular, one can very easily solve the famous Cheryl's birthday problem.

First a quick comment about dynamic epistemic logic. The purpose of the discipline is to model the knowledge and information states of different agents. That's standard epistemic logic. By making it dynamic essentially means that we are actively changing the models in our logic as new information comes into play. The focus is typically based on communication, the fact that a person comes to know information directly impacts the entire model. 

The main idea is this: We have different states of the world, or rather what the agent thinks could be the case. We also have relations between states, which basically says that the agent is unable to distinguish between which world it will be. Now the actual state is in fact one of the states. We say that an agent knows that $p$ in state $s$ if in all worlds related (including itself), $p$ is the case. Otherwise they do not know that $p$. The idea is simple, we're in a certain state, but we intuitively it could be another state. Yet if in all states we deem it could be instead, $p$ is still true, then we know for sure that $p$ is true. We might not know perse which state we're in, but we can say the proposition is correct.

Now Chery's birthday problem is as follows (https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/apr/13/how-to-solve-albert-bernard-and-cheryls-birthday-maths-problem):

Albert and Bernard just met Cheryl. “When’s your birthday?” Albert asked Cheryl.

Cheryl thought a second and said, “I’m not going to tell you, but I’ll give you some clues”. She wrote down a list of 10 dates:

• May 15, May 16, May 19
• June 17, June 18
• July 14, July 16
• August 14, August 15, August 17

“My birthday is one of these”, she said.

Then Cheryl whispered in Albert’s ear the month—and only the month—of her birthday. To Bernard, she whispered the day, and only the day.

“Can you figure it out now?” she asked Albert.

• Albert: I don’t know when your birthday is, but I know Bernard doesn’t know either.
• Bernard: I didn’t know originally, but now I do.
• Albert: Well, now I know too!

When is Cheryl’s birthday?

We can model this using the following diagram:

Here we have the different days, as states of the world. For example M15 is the state where Cheryl's birthday is May 15th. The relations between states concern distinguishability. If Albert is unable to tell two dates apart (e.g. M15, M16 then we have a linking arrow $a$. The same for Bernard. I have connected the related arrows for us. Clearly, Albert can't tell the months apart and Bernard can't tell the dates apart. This is because Albert is told which month her birthday, but not which of the days of the month. Thus all states of the same month are linked. Bernard is told the date, and so all dates are linked.

Now we process the information we're given.

Albert says that he doesn't know which day it is, but that he knows that Bertrand also doesn't know which day it is. Now, albert not knowing which it is means that the real state is $a$ connected. In fact, just looking at the graph makes this obvious since each state is $a$ connected to another. However the fact that he knows bertrand doesn't know means that the real state lies in an $a$ connected set that are each $b$ connected. The reason for this is that if the actual state had no $b$ connections, then Bertrand would know. For albert to know (i.e be certain of) Bertrand's ignorance means that every state connected to the actual state must have $b$ connections.

This gives us the far simpler diagram. Here every state was once b connected to another state. Now we can also remove all the arrows that connect to states that we have already ruled out.

Now we are told that Bertrand now knows Cheryl's birthday. This obviously means that the real state is one in which there are no b connections. And so we get the even simpler diagram:

Finally we're told that now, Albert suddenly knows. Which means that the actual state has no $a$ connections. And so we're done, Chery's birthday is July 16th.

The impressive thing about dynamic epistemic logic is that the statement of additional epistemic propositions massively changes the model. In this sense, we get what quite surprisingly the fact that agents repeatedly say what they do or do not know, actually resolves our model and gets us these solutions.

If one is further interested, they can feel free to try the same methodology onto: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/25/can-you-solve-it-cheryls-birthday-logic-puzzle-part-2-denises-revenge.

Once one is familiar with these strategies and the theory behind dynamic epistemic logic, this is very straightforward (if rather tedious to be honest). One thing to note, with more basic puzzles like these you can easily do them without having a particularly formal method. However by formalising, it not only simplifies things for you in the long run, but also makes it possible for computers to do this, by following a very exactly algorithm.

MRA's and Feminists

In this post I'm going to further discuss some previous symmetry arguments, using the example of MRA's, or men's rights activists. In particular I am going to discuss the conditions in which one can argue for lack of symmetry if they wish to avoid double standard arguments.

Let's start with the following premise: it is thought in current society that feminism is in general a good thing. Now, this isn't universally accepted perse, and there is a huge amount of disagreement about what feminism is. Yet I do think there is some kind of prevailing opinion that one should in general be favour of feminism, that one is almost doing something morally wrong otherwise. For now I suggest three kinds of definitions for feminism. The first is a movement that aims for gender equality (let us leave gender as an atomic concept), the second is a movement that aims for the improvement of women's rights, on the grounds of gender equality. The third is a movement that tackles structural gender imbalances, the focus typically being to remove what is perceived to be a patriarchal society. Whilst each definition is slightly different, it seems there is this thought that gender equality at least is something that is good and should be strives for. Someone who denies this tenet is viewed as bigoted and doing something wrong. In this sense, few would deny the principles of the first definition.

Now of course certain groups that call themselves feminist, might be viewed as very much extreme. It seems there are phenomena of groups who may be very up misandrist (man / men hating). This of course seems to be morally impermissible on the same grounds of misogyny, at least intuitively speaking. There may also be an intuition that on some level, misandary is morally better than misogyny, but  I will discuss this argument in due course. Anyway, under the first and second, there seems to be something rather questionable about this practice. A number of people who call themselves feminists would decry these misandrist groups. Now something strange I notice is that people may dislike these misandrists, not particularly because they hate men, but because they provide ammunition for supporters of men's rights activists. It seems useful now to discuss what a men's right activist is. As with feminism, there is a challenge in defining this. Some groups like to perceive them as misogynist, a group that was generated as a backlash to feminism. Now, I think the latter arguably is true, but one needs to flesh out what backlash means.

Does backlash mean opposing feminism? If so, then it must oppose at least one of our following definitions. If it opposes definition 1, then it means that they must deny gender equality. Opposing definition 2 suggests either that they deny gender equality, or that they think there is something problematic with only improving women's rights. If they deny definition 3 then they may deny structural oppression or deny the patriarchy. To me, only the denial of 1st definition is obviously problematic. Yet, it doesn't seem obvious to me that this is what MRA's are doing. In principle at least, MRA's are meant to be attaining certain types of rights for men, for example in social care, or domestic violence. It is not necessarily case that they are denying gender equality, in fact many cases seem to be promoting gender equality. At least for the first definition of feminism, MRA's can very much integrate into it. With the second definition, the two groups could in theory be parsiminous. We might for example define MRA's or Menism as the feminist equivalent: improving men's rights for the purpose of gender equality. Whilst many would think that women are the oppressed gender, I think one would have to be deliberately blind to deny that there are any instances  where men are the suffering gender.

Now, one may criticise me by claiming that MRA's whilst in principle can be consistent with feminism, in practice are just mysognist and backwards. This may be true of certain groups, yet one should consider now whether a double standards argument should be invoked. We in principle don't decry feminism just because certain 'feminists' are decreed misandrist. (Also note the following argument: some people who claim to be feminists would deny that misandrists are indeed feminists, since they will violate certain definitions of feminism). Why should we decry mens rights movements as a whole just because certain men have anti-women views? Even if most men's rights movements were indeed mysogynist, it seems wrong to decry any given group that aims to champion men's rights in a negative manner. Presumably anyone who is a true definition 1 feminist, should in fact be very much supportive of such MRA's. And vice versa of course. What I'm trying to say is that one really should not have immediately negative reactions to these groups. It should not be inherently negative to care about men's rights. In fact anyone who truly cares about gender equality should be necessarily supportive of them, at least the 'good ones'.

For a final challenge, let's consider the following asymmetry argument. Perhaps we think a la definition 3 that we live in a hard patriarchy with wide spread oppression of women. We think that perhaps there are certain instances where men suffer comparatively, but any general movement in favour of them is just morally wrong. Why should we be helping these men out, when women are suffering so much already. Surely for gender equality, we should be improving women's rights, not catering for the small cases of men's rights inequality. Whilst this argument is interesting (if extremely depressing actually if one considers individuality arguments), there are a number of issues that need to be addressed. The first thing is to justify the premise, the idea that we indeed live in a patriarchy with widespread oppression of women. Whilst many people assume this, one really does need a justification for this. This interestingly leads to an epistemic problem. Since there are extremely few cases of explicit gender discrimination against women (the vast majority seem to be against men), one must rely on implicit cases to justify the perceived oppression or patriarchy. Whilst this can certainly be done, it does face difficulties with subjectivity and intentionality. For example suppose we have such thing as the gender pay gap. That the average women gets paid less than the average man. Now if we wish to use this as an example of our opression we need to show that there is discrimination. Because it is illegal to do this explicitly, one would need to show that there is something particularly wrong with why women are less likely to go into certain industries. The simple fact of statistics is not enough: one requires an explanation to use this as fuel for our oppression argument. This is important, because we would apply the same standards towards men. Suppose someone said men were being oppressed, and gave a number of examples (e.g. high suicide rates, worse academic attainment), one would need an argument to explain why these examples fail to attain. 

To conclude, for us to really justify decrying MRA's, one has to set up quite a sophisticasted argument that is protected from double standards. You need to convincingly argue that we can vilify 

MRA's by their worst movements, but not feminism. One then needs to argue somehow that we don't need to care about men's rights because there is this pervading patriarchy. Instead, I suggest we just look at individual groups, both feminist and MRA groups, and see whether they have justification. In principal at least, MRA and Feminists should work in sync, for they are promoting the same thing: attaining gender equality.

A theory of discrimination [5]: Rationality and unconscious bias

My theory so far has been largely normative. The thought is that it depicts which cases of discrimination would be permitted in an idealised society and provides a general algorithm (Base Omega) approach to attain said ideals. This idealisation has certain weaknesses however; it depicts each individual as acting perfectly in accordance to the theory. It happens that in reality, people lack the same degree of perfection. This is of course common with normative theories, the idea being that we should attempt to act in the idealised way. For example in epistemology we say that rational agents will not believe in contradictions and their credence functions ought to be probabilistic. The issue is that our theory of discrimination has considerable moral and political impacts. In this sense we have additional reasons against complete abstraction. We must recognise that agents are not ideal and in fact I suggest this should be incorporated into the theory.

According to our theory, individual agents ought not discriminate based on protected characteristics unless there is a significant reason / it is mandated in relation to the context. (A clarification point: base Omega says innocent until proven guilty, unless in the case of protected characteristics where we apply base Delta concepts of guilty until innocent) The scope of our theory is meant mostly to cover action, additional moral and epistemic argument would need to be established for the theory to have impositions on the thoughts and beliefs of ideal agents. That is, the theory tells us how to act, it doesn't in itself tell us that we should actually believe it. Thus it allows for agents who for example hate German people but do not act upon their beliefs. In practice however, this allowance is only available to ideal and rational agents. This is because only they are able to fully separate belief from action, metaphysically speaking. Ordinary agents are imperfect in seperating their beliefs and their actions. Their actions inevitably are based around their beliefs. Furthermore, sometimes this is unconscious.

Unconscious bias involves making quick judgements and assessments on entities without our conscious realisation. These biases can be influenced by our background, the cultural context as well as our personal experiences. Notably, these biases can influence our behaviour; we may for example be more intimidated at night by a black man than white woman. I leave it neutral at the moment as to whether this is justified. The main thing is that idealised agents would not be susceptible to these biases. They are consciously aware of all of their actions and can act perfectly in accordance to our normative theory. However since humans are non ideal, unconscious bias is a topic that should be accounted for.

One way to do this is by separating the theory into conscious and unconscious cases. In some sense this is quite intuitive; there seems to be thought that conscious discrimination is (if impermissible) worse than unconscious discrimination. The idea presumably is that conscious discrimination bridges one's beliefs and one's actions. If the individual consciously discriminates against black people, then this suggests that the individual believes / is in favour / supports some kind of discriminatory practices. On the other hand, an individual can be unconsciously discriminating in action whilst having non discriminative beliefs. For example some data suggests that science faculties may be more inclined to hire male candidates over female candidates. Our theory of course states that this is impermissible, and it is likely many recruiters in said faculties agree with the theory. Regardless, they may still be discriminative due to unconscious biases. It seems that faculties that behave as such unconsciously are morally better (although still wrong) than those that consciously do so, for example by actively giving credit on the basis of gender.

In terms of action guidance, it seems considerably easier to deal with conscious discrimination. The thought here is that consciousness discrimination is at least easy to notice. An entity is explicit in their discrimination, which if impermissible should be dealt with. Unconscious biases and the resulting discrimination are harder since it is not so explicit. Standard justifications of normative theories tell our imperfect agents to mimic our idealised agents. Thus we want to say that individuals should behave away from their unconscious biases. This unfortunately is not particularly helpful; it is not useful to tell me not to be fooled by things I can't actively control. In terms of guidance however we can still appeal to things such as education or ways for us to recognise our unconscious biases. The discussion here however ceases to be normative. The best way to deal with unconscious bias will thus seem to be a matter of empirical investigation.

A theory of discrimination [4]: Symmetry arguments

In this post I'm going to discuss symmetry arguments. These arguments typically arise as objections to discrimination against 'privileged groups'. For example say we didn't allow white men into a film showing. Someone might object that this is unacceptable because if you replaced white men with black women it would be viewed as utterly immoral. These arguments are typically based around some idea of positive discrimination. I'm going to argue that they are interesting and have some force but unfortunately they cannot apply. The symmetry doesn't work here.

So far the theory I have developed has the following kind of structure:

1) Discrimination is not inherently bad: Base Omega theory says that discrimination is permissible unless there is significant reason of the contrary.

2) Whether an instance of discrimination is permissible depends on both the context and the factor being discriminated against.

3) Principle of distributional equality: Across protected characteristics such as race, gender, sexuality all groups have the same talent distribution.

4) One can permissibly discriminate based on a factor if it is significantly relevant for the fundamental goal of the context.

Conclusion:

5) By 3 and 4, in talent related contexts such as jobs, education etc, it is is impermissible to discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics.

In particular, this means that it is impermissible to discriminate on the base of for example, race, in the context of education. This seems rather plausible, it would seem immoral for example to prevent black students from entering higher education on the basis of their race. What however about the contrary? What about 'positive discrimination'?

Something my theory has so far maintained is a kind of neutrality. Whilst it discusses discrimination on the basis of race, it takes individual races as abstract entities that can be plugged into a formula. The thought here is that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong in itself, and every instance of it regardless of which race it is targeted towards is morally impermissible. On some level this is very much intuitive. On another level, it feels like it is too abstract that it misses elements of reality. There is the thought perhaps that discrimination against certain races may be morally worse than discrimination against other races. Whilst I find this discussion rather uncomfortable I think it is important to address.

First things first: in an ideal or equilibrium state, it seems obvious that discrimination against all races is of equal moral weight. In an ideal state we would have no notions of racism in the sense of power dynamics, or history. There would be no impact of things like slavery, war and politics in the case of discrimination. These ideal states allow for perfect execution of base omega theory, we just systematically follow our method to discuss which cases of discrimination are good or bad. It seems harder to apply to this to our current reality. Whilst our base omega theory has some good applications, it is in some sense too discrete: whilst it tells us that some things may be permissible or not, it doesn't tell us the scope. It is not clear that our action guidance here is deontic: they may just provide moral reasons of different strength. There is the thought that whilst discriminating against white and black people is both wrong,  perhaps it is worse to do so against black people in our current society. 

Let's lay neutral to that conclusion for now. In our current reality, there are unfortunately things such as history that have impacts, conscious or subconscious on how we treat individuals. Whilst my theory largely covers explicit discrimination; we also need to recognise implicit cases where the subjects are unaware of some things they may do. Now one might consider the example of a black student who is unable to get a certain grade to get into a university. Perhaps being black is unfortunately correlated with a number of things such as going to a state school, being more likely to be part of a gang or so on. It seems inevitable that even if we followed our theory to not discriminate on the basis of race, there would still be very unevent treatment, despite our principal of distributional equality. Recall that the principal is meant to capture the notion that without discrimination, we expect equal distributions since all races are meant to be equal. In our real case we can clearly see a problem with our principal: its aims and the outcomes do not align.

This opens the door to positive discrimination arguments. For example universities may offer students from state schools lower offers on the grounds that they have achieved less support. This is of course an instance of discrimination, and perhaps one that my system would deem immoral. Yet this idea does not seem so fundamentally problematic. It perhaps sounds worse if we give black students lower offers, but upon statistical justification and restatement of our theory, even if can seem not so awful after all.

This sort of argument can be repeated in many cases, leading to arguments that for example it is permissible to discriminate against men or be racist against white people. Permissible not in the strict sense of course; but that relatively speaking it is less bad, and that the action may overall be morally okay if it helps achieve a good outcome. For example the labour party enforced 50/50 women politicians. This is of course discriminative, but they are motivated by claims that women are otherwise discriminated against / correlated discrimination with factors such as social pressures.

The important thing to note is that the base omega theory cannot be applied directly to imperfect or current situations. It serves really as an ideal. In our current situation, there is a lack of symmetry. In particular, it means that discrimination against for example races A and B are not morally equivalent, and perhaps additional analysis is required. This is not to say that I condone for example positive discrimination, I very much dislike it and will address this in a later post. I simply want to rebutt assymetry arguments. In particular there may exist arguments that propose discrimination against for example white men can often meet backlash claims of sexism or racism. They are reminded that it would horrific if you for example replaced white men with black women. Whilst I dislike both cases, this argument fails because the substitution is unjustified. Unfortunately in our current society, in most contexts black women and white men do not occupy the same kind of status that would justify these moral claims about permissibility of discrimination. Whilst they are both persons which means their interests should be taken into account, the factor of history and the subconscious impacts it has makes direct substitution unjust. Many theorists would of course appeal to notions of power dynamics, cases of subjugation between races, genders and so on. I don't necessarily go down that route, but I can see the argument. I certainly accept that these symmetry arguments are faulty in some sense.

Addressing Moral Sceptics

I've discussed this previously with many ordinary people surprisingly willing to embraces different brands of moral scepticism. I find this phenomenon very surprising. In this post I'm going to talk about some meta-ethical theory in order to help people come to a decision. I am a realist (at the moment) myself, but my aim is less to promote this position but more to clarify what moral scepticism means, or at least what people seem to think it means. I am concerned that people adopt this position without understanding what the position entails, let alone it's consequences. This post is thus targetted at the non-philosopher someone who isn't familiar with the theory but of course is interested in ethics, minimally as a practical matter. Due to this I only target the arguments they are likely familiar with.

Normative ethics asks what things are moral, while meta-ethics discuss what are moral things. In other words, what is the nature of morality. People are perhaps most familiar with the concept of moral objectivism. In ordinary terms, this refers to morality being objective: there is the right and there is the wrong. Someone who is a moral objectivist believes in a brand of moral realism. They think that morality as a concept truly exists. This doesn't mean that their own moral claims are true - it only means that moral claims have the capacity to be true, and that they are meaningful. The intuition for this likely comes from trying to understand what certain sentences mean. If we say something like "Killing is wrong", for this to be true seems to be saying something about "wrong". It appears to be a genuine property, or at least a real thing. By real, I don't mean that we can always perceive it. What I mean is that it exists, even if we can't perceive it. In other words, it is mind independent.

Keep Moral realism in mind as a main point of comparison. The following positions I'm going to discuss deviate from the realist position in different ways.

When discussing meta-ethics with friends who do not study philosophy, a very common line of argument I hear is "Isn't it all subjective?" I will now attempt to describe what such a position entails.

The claim made here sounds like moral subjectivism. Like realism, this claims that moral sentences are truth evaluable. The difference is that the truth of such sentences are dependent on the evaluating agent. For example we might hold that morality is relative to a given society or even to a given person. In this sense, what might be morally wrong in the UK might not morally wrong in other countries. What might be right for you might not be right for me.

I think the main motivation people have towards this position are concerns about cultural superiority. They don't want to say that the moral standards of their own society are better than others. The thought is presumably something like:

1) I live in society X and adopt moral standards Y

2) If morality is objective, then there is  only one kind of standard

3) If morality is objective then Either that standard is mine or it is not mine

4) If it is mine, then any opposing ones are wrong. Thus societies with opposing standards are wrong.

5) If it is not mine, then why am I even behaving in accordance to this standard. Why shouldn't I go about for example killing people?

Both 4 and 5 are uncomfortable. We don't want to say we're better than others, yet we also don't want to say our standards are meaningless. By being more 'open minded' and adopting moral relativism, we side step these issues.

Now for some issues. The first of course is a question regarding the mechanism involved. Suppose that you and I have a disagreement about morality. You believe we should go around and enslave children for our bidding. I think that this is morally wrong. If you adopt a version of subjectivism, presumably we must engage in a degree of mutual tolerance to one another. If you suppose that the law is based at least partially upon morality, you can recognise that morality has real practical impacts. We need to make ethical decisions and differentiate between different actions. Moral subjectivism offers no way to disagree if both sides are equally right. Perhaps you respond that we live in the same society and thus must follow the same rules, but this also seems problematic. This kind of argument seems to be social as opposed to ethical. You're saying something along the lines that I agree to a certain set of rules by being in this society. Yet you aren't saying whether or not these rules have any kind of real moral status. You're instead going towards a kind of moral scepticism. 

The version of moral scepticism I will now discuss is known as error theory. This claims that all moral sentences are false. Since they are all false, everyone is effectively wrong. Thus we capture the idea that everyone has made a mistake. One advantage of error theory compared to subjectivism is its approach to disagreement. If morality does not exist, our disagreements can be understood in terms of non moral concepts. We can explain it in terms of social concepts, for example we are pressured by society to accept certain ideas. 

One issue of course is that one now needs to explain why we are systemically making these mistakes. Recall that our error theory means that whenever we make a moral claim, we are saying something false. There are no moral concepts. Yet we think or at least act as though there are. This needs an explanation. One obvious objection of course is that since our moral talk is meaningless, we are free (on 'moral' grounds at least) to do as we choose. This seems a fairly outrageous conclusion that I think few people would accept. Thus one needs a satisfying social explanation, one that is descriptive in terms of our behavior, and also normative in why we should continue behaving in this way.

I think the social argument also has a few difficulties. The main problem is that there is something very uncomfortable about the idea that the only thing stopping us from killing people is that society tells us to. There are also difficulties with reconciling how our attitudes change. We like to believe that the reason we are able to reach ethical conclusions that for example homosexuality is permissible is because we are reaching the truth of the matter, achieved after evaluating the evidence or argument. It is concerning if such conclusions are not grounded by anything, just lessons from society. We might give an explanation of moral behaviour in terms of pragmatic or social optimality, but this seems rather unsatisfying.

Before I end this post, I'm going to quickly discuss some worries concerning moral realism. I think the reasons why people adopt these sceptical positions is just because they don't think realism is capable of dealing with these problems.

1) Explaining disagreement: as I discussed earlier, how can we reconcile objective morality with the fact that disagreement occurs?

2) Accessing moral properties: We seem to have intuitions about morality, but we never seem to actually experience or see the moral properties. We say that killing is wrong, but do we ever 'see' wrong? It certainly seems to be something very different from for example experiencing the colour and property of redness.

3) Accessing the objective standard. People often associate objective morality with God-like beings, or something that dictates the standard. If they do not believe in God they think that said objectivity can not be attained. The actual problem is not that morality can't be objective, but the question of how on earth we discover it. At least the bible is professing to tell us about an objective standard from God and we can see if we're on track. If it comes else where, we need to rely on alternative mediums.