Skepticism, moral realism and applied ethics (1)

In this post I want to discuss the connections between these three issues, and argue for the need to have a theory that attempts to unify them in a coherent manner.

A good starting point is a discussion of moral realism. Let us define the moral realist position as the claim that there exist things like moral facts, and that these moral facts can be true independent of our perception or beliefs about them. Moral realism claims that sentences such as 'abortion is wrong' are the sort of sentences that attempts to describe reality, and the sort of sentences that can be true because when they successfully describe reality.

Due to the mind independenct nature of these sentences, we can connect moral realism with views such as moral objectivism - the claim that morality is objective. As a result, if two people have conflicting moral attitudes, they cannot both be correct and we could in theory use the objective moral standards to determine who is correct.

Now in many ways, moral realism does seem quite intuitive. In particular the claim that moral sentences can be truthful. Not all of them of course - 'rape is right' seems like an false sentence. Yet when I go around telling people that murder is wrong, it seems as if I am doing the correct thing; that what I say not only has impact, but also has content. That it is in some sense meaningful and backed up.

Now there are many challenges to moral realism. The most common challenge that I observe is the problem of disagreement. In particular, one might observe that different people will see the same issue in different ways, morally speaking. I might think that it is immoral for a women to have abortions, whilst someone else might think that such an action is morally permissible. The issue it seems is that I don't seem to have anything to ground my view, i.e. I lack any concrete evidence that would prove me correct over the other person. Intuitions also don't seem to fully resolve these issues because we might have very different intuitions depending on our upbringing and culture. As many people would argue, it is arrogant to assume that our own theory of morality is correct when none of us have 'real evidence'.

I say 'real evidence' because I'm making the comparison to theories in science where our evidence, one might argue, is concrete. We can see it, and we can point to it as evidence. This provides a rather nice epistemology about how we might know our scientific theories are correct, or at least provides justification in believing them. It seems with morality, our evidence is only what we feel, and perhaps the hope that other people feel the same way. Since we presumably want to be justified in our beliefs, this gives us reason to doubt that our own moral intutions correspond to any objective moral values. Furthermore, if we apply the same reasoning to every other individual, we might reject the idea of objective morality altogether. The thought is that since we have so much disagreement, and we have no way of verifying who is correct, perhaps there is no such thing as a 'correctness' in the first place.

There are two interesting lines we might go down from here. So far we have this recognition of an epistemic problem. If morality is true independent of what we know, how do we know that what we think is right (our 'own morality') is the truthful one?  Furthermore, if morality is objective but is something completely in accessible to us, then why should we take our moral intuitions seriously at all. For example if I have no concrete evidence for the claim 'killing is wrong', then even if this claim is correct, the fact that I can't justify my belief in the claim should suggest I should not believe in it. In this sense, perhaps our whole talk of morality is an entire sham. Suppose we think indeed that we cannot epistemically access moral claims. Then either, 1) we are discussing things with content (because morality is objective), but we have no access to and have no way to justify, or 2) we are discussing things which are entirely without content and so our various claims about them are in some sense meaningless. I say in some sense, because many things that appear unsubstantiated by the world could have meaning if people's minds are influenced by them.

The argument so far has suggested that we be sceptical about moral sentences. It has given us many reasons to doubt the truth and justification when we make claims that 'killing is wrong'. What do we do now? One thing perhaps is to doubt the existence of morality in the independent reality. The question then is how we should respond to people making moral claims. You will presumably see everyone who is making moral claims as in some sense making meaningless statements. The exact content of what they see is empty, because whenever they use 'moral vocabulary' there is literally nothing for their words to point at.

At the same time, it seems like we do have significant motivation to follow by whatever rules our current system of morality has. For example, I do want to live in a society where people think killing each other is morally wrong, or where stealing is viewed as bad or where being kind is a good thing. And I say this independently of legal reasons. I want to live in a society where murder is bad for reasons beyond the law. Yet if I follow my very sceptical position towards moral realism, I will also have to be content with accepting that such wants, both in my beliefs and in my actions, lack real content. And that is unsatisfying I think.

In my next post I will discuss how we should connect our views on morality with our views on action, and how having a moral sceptical position is undesirable. I will then discuss ways we might justify our belief in moral realism.

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.