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A Basis for Objective Morality
By: Gamer

Suffering and Negative Mental States as a Basis for an Objective Morality

In this essay I aim to show that an objective morality can be achieved through the universalisability of the experience of suffering. In a Godless universe normative value appears mysterious and elusive, it’s origin unknown and its authority finally under question. I aim to show how normative claims earn their authority and why they are important to respect. Some physicalists and determinists may feel short changed by this paper’s lack of justification for the existence of mental states but the aim of the paper is not to justify mental states (which are immediately experienced anyway) but to show their implications for us and for the world we live in.

Shared Suffering

Suffering is a common term in our day to day vocabulary, it can be used to describe a number of things, ranging from the abstract concept of a society suffering, of an economy suffering, through to the immediate feelings of physical pain and mental anguish. In this paper I will be using the term suffering in a very specific way. This is to ensure suffering is always not only descriptive, but also normative. It may be stated that “suffering is not always bad” as some people enjoy suffering. Some people may for example enjoy cutting themselves or feeling pain. This objection is simply mistaken however in terms of what this paper means by suffering. Physical pain is not strictly speaking suffering, suffering is simply and only a negative mental state. Under this definition the masochist isn’t experiencing suffering, a negative mental state, but in fact is experiencing a positive mental state, happiness, from a conventionally negative-mental-state causing phenomena.

Because we all experience suffering and we all know about suffering, our subjective experience of suffering, which only we can experience, is linked to everyone else's through its definition. One of the things we all know about suffering is we would rather avoid it (by definition, or we would not class it as suffering), and from that we can get an objective morality because everyone experiences suffering and wants to avoid it. This common goal or motivation means that “what is good” can be calculated by what ever helps this common goal (to avoid suffering).

Many may see this point as trivial as if different things cause our suffering then how can we seem unable to have a common goal at all. If one thing makes me suffer and one thing makes you suffer we will want to do different things. If anything can cause suffering, then does suffering really mean anything? It is like a box the contents of which are unknown to you. You might know everything about the box, but if you don't know what's in it there might be something important about it you don't know. And if you get another box, the same in everyway including the fact you don't know what is in either of them, could you really say they are the same till you look inside? Many would say not really. You can say they are the same as far you can see. If suffering is the box and the thing making you suffer is the thing in the box, this sort of illustrates why you might want to say our suffering isn't really the same if it's caused by different things.

An example of suffering that may not be considered the same could be someone getting murdered and someone missing Hollyoaks. Obviously we should welcome death and the person getting murdered will only experience (by experience I am always referring to the direct and absolute experience of a mental state) slight suffering, but someone who has missed their favourite TV Show is likely to experience far greater anguish. Is it fair to say these two very different mental states are the same? It seems not to be.

However, perhaps the justification for a foundation of morality which we recently elaborated upon requires not for the two states to be the same, but only that they have something in common. If suffering is in degrees, almost as if on a scale, then perhaps it is enough for experiences of suffering to be on the same scale, and therefore share some essential property. I.e. someone (x) who has had a relatively peaceful life can empathise with someone who has recently been tortured (y) not because x has experienced what y has, or even because x can use reason to imagine y’s experience, but because x knows everything about the difference between pleasure and suffering, and x’s relatively tame experience of suffering shares an aspect of y’s experience. This is the essential property of suffering, without which, the experience would not be suffering. And if we all know everything about this essential aspect of suffering then this would still be enough to give us a foundation for morality.

Are Emotions Good Bad or Yellow?

The language it is written and thought in often restricts philosophy. Sometimes grammatical conventions and verbal traditions are difficult to shake off, but must be necessarily discarded of in order to reason as objectively of possible. I suggest that a mistake has been made about the way we all think of emotions and mental states, and that once this mistake is cleared up it has dramatic consequences for moral philosophy.

Mental states are directly and immediately experienced and differ with time. Emotive words such as happy, sad, angry, lustful, weary, bored and lazy all seem to relate to relatively different mental states. Most have two uses, to describe a mental state that it relates to, and to describe a likely set of actions someone in that state may take. The actions someone is likely to take are usually worked out either rationally from one’s own experience (what did I want to do last time I was Sad) or through other’s i.e. society teaches us happy people smile, sad people cry. From these sources we are likely to gain a lot of knowledge about the nature of happiness/anger etc. but in order to know about the mental state of anger we must experience it.

In this sense the mental states are in fact a lot like our sense data. We are immediately aware of them, they cannot be doubted and we experience them. Learning about them through reason would be impossible (i.e. a blind man can reason what red is).

Emotions are often thought of as on a scale of positive/negative, but I would suggest this is confusion. The physical sense of touch includes pain, which appears to be on a scale, as it can be mild are strong. This is the body’s way of indicating something is wrong and it is thus labelled “negative”, but not strictly speaking in a normative sense. Pain is not “bad” or “wrong” intrinsically, in fact some may find physical pain creates positive mental states and is therefore “good”. Mental states therefore seem to be the source of normative value, on a sliding scale of good to bad; happiness at the “good end”, suffering at the “bad end”.

A problem however arises when we try to match up emotions (which are immediately experienced) to this scale. Some seem to fit nicely, such as happiness and sadness. Others seem a little more problematic, such as anger or boredom. The fact is, happiness refers merely to those mental states that we value, and suffering to those that we do not. Suffering is more of a meta-emotion, a thing intrinsically worthy of avoiding.

Your Suffering, Not Mine

Some may argue that the similarity between mental states and sense data is even stronger than one may immediately believe as neither technically have normative values. The mental states are merely experiences, much like sense data, but of the self and not of the external world.

We therefore impose the normative values onto the mental states. Positive and negative mental states are only positive or negative in virtue of our deeming them to be so. The argument continues that if this is the case, surely morality is subjective and has no authority, and imposed normative value is not an objective one, intrinsic to the mental state itself, and therefore has no authority.

This argument is however mistaken in its premises. Mental states are in fact intrinsically normative, that is to say either desirable or undesirable. This is the case because to claim that we can choose to like or dislike a mental state is contradictory, as liking and disliking are both mental states themselves. Even if we wish to say that boredom is neither good nor bad, suffering due to boredom seems to remain intrinsically negative.

The Two Routes from Egoism

At this stage we seem to have justified only a personal morality, a hedonistic and selfish affair by which we are doomed to avoid X and seek out Y ignoring the world around us.

Firstly I think that this approach is mistaken simply because the world/the universe/other people/existence are valuable not only in respect in virtue of the values we place in them but also but to an irrespective value we can either see or ignore, “beauty”. This claim is obviously a complicated affair to justify, and I won’t be justifying it, but I felt it was worth mentioning it to keep the claims of how this objective morality should be founded in context.

Fortunately however, this first reason does not require justification, as there is a second reason that the hedonistic approach is unjustified. This is the paper-thin inductive argument. Induction is often personified as an inferior, human, form of reasoning, offering only probability whereas deduction is natural reasoning and offers the far more satisfying certainty we seek. I would however argue that this view is entirely mistaken, that in fact the world is either naturally probabilistic or so deeply complex in it’s deductive truth that we can only seem to cope with an inductive average of its patterns.

The Fall of Deduction

Consider for example the language of mathematics. Epistemologically a very complex subject, some claim it has a priori truth whereas others claim it is sterile unless applied and contrasted with the world. Maths is essentially a language just like English, Spanish or Dutch. It has words that "mean things" e.g. 2, and it has words that are "functions" between these things e.g. +.

The reason maths is so different to any other language, and the reason many wish to ascribe it a priori authority, is that the words that "mean things" are all defined only in terms of each other. By this I mean that "2" only makes sense in light of what "4" means, and "4" only makes sense in light of what "0.0030336" means. As such maths is an entirely tautological language, all the term's definitions are tied up in each other; just as male and man only make sense in light of each other, 3 and 7 only make sense in light of each other.

What makes “3” and “7”, different to “man” and “male”, is that as well as referring to each other, the terms "man" and "male" also refer to something in the world! Men! Whereas the numbers "2" and "4" refer only to other numbers, no thing in the external world. The terms can be applied to the world, but this is merely our imposing them onto the world. e.g. If we see 2 apples, we are actually seeing one apple of parts X,Y,Z and another with parts A,B,C. The two apples in fact differ; they are physically similar but ultimately different. They are only “two” because they both conform to a man-made definition. As such we are imposing the property of “2” onto the world. There are not “2” existing objective things, but merely “2” successes of the external world conforming to human made qualifiers to be classed as an apple. Applying maths to the world in this way asks, “to what extent is this aspect of reality tautological?” and the reply is “the extent to which those two apples are similar”.

The Rise of Induction

On the topic of induction Hume writes that inductive arguments are justified by the suppressed premise that unobserved events will follow the pattern of observed ones. He then goes on to claim that this cannot be justified and as such inductive reasoning is not strictly rational. I would however argue that the inductive claim is justified, by empirical evidence.

The claim that: “unobserved events will follow the pattern of observed ones” is contingently true, this claim attempts certainty and as such fails. It is also unverifiable. The probabilistic claim that “unobserved events usually follow the pattern of observed ones” is however not only verifiable but also apparent and true.

Seemingly trivial examples such as the Sun rising every day seem to work well, but even complex theories of physics and maths all tie in, in the attempt to construct more and more intricate patterns capable of predicting “what comes next?” As these patterns are successful they gain their probabilistic authority. Induction seems to just justified by itself, in that it’s own success leads us to grant it authority.

Many would claim that this is contradictory, and circular. If induction is only justified by itself, then it is not really justified at all. I would however not only argue that this is mistaken, I would argue it is in itself incoherent. If induction were to be justified deductively, to certainly be valid, it wouldn’t be “inductive reasoning” it would simply be a sub-level of deductive reasoning. A type of reasoning cannot be justified, as justification is a rational endeavour, and in order to use the reason needed to justify the form of reasoning you wish to justify, you must first presuppose the authority of the reasoning you wish to use to justify the form of reasoning.

This is similar to asking “how red is red?” or “is a centimetre big?” Red merely involves the claim that “there exists colours” and length claims, “there is space”. What inductive reasoning amounts to is merely the claim “some things are probably probabilistic”.

Once we have established that induction is not only self-justified, but has to be so, as to justify a form of reasoning is contradictory, we must then apply induction to the world before we achieve an objective morality.

The Paper-Thin Inductive Argument, Man vs. the Moon

If where there is A, there is B then where there is C, and C is similar to A, there is probably D, and D is probably similar to B in the absence of a reason for why the difference between A and C should effect the likelihood of B and D.

This argument is as inductively justified and to as high an extent as any argument we accept under induction. One example we may use to justify this is the connection between touching fire and pain. If we touch one fire, and it burns us, then the next time we see a fire like thing, phenomenologically similar, we are rational not to touch it. There is a probability involved, a risk, and as more and more experience of the world confirms the connection between the fire phenomena and the pain phenomena, this risk becomes more and more serious.

Then we have another example of the argument working, whenever I eat, I am satisfied, so I am more and more certain that eating will satisfy me. Then another example crops up regarding the amount of fallen leaves and the seasons. Then another regarding going out when it’s raining and catching a cold. Essentially the number of examples of this argument build up to the point where the principle of “if A means B then ‘similar to A, C’ means ‘similar to B, D’” itself becomes probable.

However the moon seems to pose a serious threat to this principle being adopted. As only one example is needed to deny the principle’s adoption, a counter example could be constructed such as: When there is the Earth there is the Moon; When there is earth-like-Protons there is moon-like-electrons; or even when there is earth-like-Sun there is moon-like-earth. These three examples of when there is sphere1, there is smaller sphere2 orbiting seem to form an argument for “spheres probably have smaller spheres orbiting them”. This claim at the same time seems to be unjustified; if I had a tennis ball surely it is rational by the same means to think that there will be a smaller ball orbiting it? Not all the planets have moons, protons seem capable of existing without any electrons orbiting therefore the connection isn’t necessarily true. This objection stands in one way and fails in another. It stands in that the connection isn’t necessary; it is probable. It is simply the case that it is probable a tennis ball would have a smaller ball orbiting it from the empirical evidence cited. It is however the case that further investigation reveals that man made tennis balls are subject to a vastly different history to planets, and the process by which the smaller balls come to orbit the planets probably never happened to a tennis ball. Investigation produces clarity, but morality, the argument of man, is not of the same type as this example of the moon at it’s foundation. Learning right from wrong is a case of investigation producing clarity, but the fact of right and wrong is not.

This is because the claim that when we see a person and claim them to experience suffering, we are not arguing:
If A means B then ‘similar to A, C’ means ‘similar to B, D’

We are in fact claiming:
If A means B then ‘similar to A, C’ means D itself!

This is due to the universal nature of suffering, which it is by definition normative and as such everyone knows everything about it. We cannot claim that the other person is experiencing a certain emotion, but we can reason that they are experiencing a mental state they would rather not be, this mental state is therefore by definition suffering just as our experience of negative mental states is suffering and as such should be avoided.

An example of how this all comes to be applied in day-to-day reasoning could be how when we look in the mirror we see a phenomena, a set phenomena. We never see George Bush, unless we are either George Bush or mentally incapable somehow (that’s and inclusive or by the way). We see a set ourselves, a face with distinct features, and although these features change over time, there is a certain consistency about them, a flow of development. Not only this but also these features, collectively called the “face” or “body” seem to be in conjunction with these immediately experienced mental states. It is through the paper-thin inductive argument we come to realise that other similar bodies probably experience mental states too. Not only this, but we also come to realise that as I experience suffering, so is it likely that the similar body experiences similar suffering. Under the examination of the nature of suffering we find that the essential aspect is simply the fact it should be avoided. To describe something as similar to suffering is nonsense, as if it is the case that it shouldn’t necessarily be avoided then it has nothing in common with suffering, whereas if it should be avoided, it is suffering. So the thing that other people probably experience isn’t “something like suffering”, it is suffering.

This essay aimed only to provide a basis for an objective morality, what that morality may consist of, the complications of agreeing to a set morality and how to ensure it is adhered to are all important but irrelevant concerns. This argument proves that people probably experience suffering, and in the absence of a good empirical reason to doubt this, such as finding everyone is made of wires and circuits, we should continue to build on our paper-thin inductive foundations for all knowledge, giving moral facts the same inductive probable status as scientific fact. I cannot prove that murder is wrong, but I can show that murder is as wrong as the Sun is likely to rise.

Article Source: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com

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