Moral judgements aren’t simply about consciousness, but they reduce ultimately to how they move the character of conscious experience, including in a broad sense… Even theistic moral claims, homosexuality is bad etc., are about making sure your conscious experience stays positive, or more positive.
This is the claim I deny. People value many things other than conscious experience and make moral judgements based on things other than conscious experience (not even indirectly about conscious experience). If you want to argue that actually, despite appearances, all valuations are indirectly about conscious experience, this needs further argument.
I don’t think “homosexuality is wrong” can be plausibly analysed as derivatively about changes in conscious experience. That’s just not what people’s moral judgements are about. But here are some other examples:
-On the whole people strongly disvalue experience machines or wireheading
-In Haidtian/dumbfounding cases, people disvalue things even when it is made very clear there is no negative result for anyone’s conscious experiences.
-People care non-derivatively about their projects being fulfilled even if this results in no change to their or anyone else’s conscious experience at all
-People can, without contradiction, value an empty consciousness-free universe that is pretty more than one that is ugly
-People judge that wrongdoers should have (often intense) negative experience; this is not plausibly accounted for as derivatively about their own positive experience about the fact that wrongdoers suffer- that’s just not what they are making judgements about.
-People will routinely endorse trading off infinite or near infinite positive/negative experience for things which are totally unrelated to conscious experience- it is hard to make sense of this as simply ultimately about caring about conscious experiences.
RF: If you think that pain, misery, and suffering, are merely subjective tastes, and are unsure why you shouldn’t value those states instead of things like love, laughter, and satiety, you’re thoroughly confused. Conscious experience is, by its very nature, already and immediately coloured with a certain kind of character.
DM: This looks like non-scientific, non-physical claim. How would you cash this out in purely naturalistic, non-normative terms and once you have done so, why should we care about it?
RF: I think you’re confused about consciousness, and maybe about what we’re saying about consciousness. If you don’t agree that there is a Nagelian “what it is like” inherently present in conscious experience, I don’t know how to convince you.
What’s my confusion? Whether or not I should introspectively recognise that I am conscious and that it has an inherent qualitative (and normative, and valenced!) character, this is not a scientific argument: it’s a philosophical argument based on appeal to people introspecting and finding our certain normative truths about their qualia.
Bracketing that can of worms, consciousness is, under this image, just another material thing. Granted, we don’t have a full science of it yet, but we know there are neural correlates of consciousness. So the “what it is like”, the colour of consciousness, is nonetheless material, and amenable to scientific inquiry… the claim about conscious experience is entirely scientific.”
Firstly, this seems to be making things too easy for yourself. You can’t just say ‘We all know we have intrinsically valenced phenomenal consciousness and these intrinsically valenced conscious experiences are all purely material… IOU one account of the relation between private conscious experiences and material science.’
But the main point here is that the claims about consciousness that your argument relies on are not “entirely scientific”, I’m not sure they’re even at all scientific. It’s not clear at all how you would translate “good”/”bad”/”value” into material, scientific terms. Note that this is a distinct point from saying that you lack an account of how representational content reduce to neural structures- the point here is that the terms contained in your claim about consciousness are all entirely non-scientific.
I’d be interested to know a worthwhile goal, that has nothing to do with the conscious experience of anyone, which starving yourself to death allows you to reach.
See my first and second responses above. I don’t think freedom from oppression are simply derivatively valued based on their implications for positively valenced conscious experience. One can have more positive conscious experience under conditions of oppression, injustice, lack of freedom etc. and yet prefer to be free of oppression etc. Likewise retribution or desert judgements are not about conscious experience (indeed they’re sometimes about solely worsening conscious experience). Similarly judgements about fairness are non-reducible to judgements about conscious experience. It is commonplace for the fair thing to diverge from the positive conscious experience promoting thing. Scientific investigation of conscious experiences doesn’t even begin to tell us why it’s unjust to keep someone in a perpetually drugged state so that a gang of people can have their way with them.
There is no doubt an infinite number of ways to have equally good plumbing arrangements, almost every house will be idiosyncratic in how it balances those considerations you listed. That doesn’t stop us from saying there are objectively bad ones. Lead pipes are bad, for example. Pipes that leak and therefore don’t get water to their respective taps are bad. That’s all we have to admit… We’re pluralists about plumbing, not relativists.
How do you avoid relativism? Suppose Bill and Ben share a house, and Bill says that the reliable but hard to repair (and so on) plumbing option is best and Ben says the less reliable but easy to repair (and so on) plumbing option is best. A plausible analysis of such cases is that which plumbing solution is “best” makes sense only relative to the values of Bill, Ben or some other imagined valuer. What scientific investigation settles which is the best plumbing option or whether they are both (by chance) exactly equally good plumbing solutions? Of course, one can be a pluralist non-relativist, but I don’t see the motivation for the view in cases like this. It’s all very well to say “When my faucet spews water I don’t tell guests, “Who are you to say your plumbing is better than mine?” (after all, few people value maximising water leaks) but the same rhetorical force does not extend to things like the Bill/Ben case. Indeed it strikes me as weird to think that there is a determinate and objective “best” plumbing solution (or multiple solutions identically tied for best) and successful plumbing certainly doesn’t require it.
Thanks for the reply Robert.
This is the claim I deny. People value many things other than conscious experience and make moral judgements based on things other than conscious experience (not even indirectly about conscious experience). If you want to argue that actually, despite appearances, all valuations are indirectly about conscious experience, this needs further argument.
I don’t think “homosexuality is wrong” can be plausibly analysed as derivatively about changes in conscious experience. That’s just not what people’s moral judgements are about. But here are some other examples: -On the whole people strongly disvalue experience machines or wireheading -In Haidtian/dumbfounding cases, people disvalue things even when it is made very clear there is no negative result for anyone’s conscious experiences. -People care non-derivatively about their projects being fulfilled even if this results in no change to their or anyone else’s conscious experience at all -People can, without contradiction, value an empty consciousness-free universe that is pretty more than one that is ugly -People judge that wrongdoers should have (often intense) negative experience; this is not plausibly accounted for as derivatively about their own positive experience about the fact that wrongdoers suffer- that’s just not what they are making judgements about. -People will routinely endorse trading off infinite or near infinite positive/negative experience for things which are totally unrelated to conscious experience- it is hard to make sense of this as simply ultimately about caring about conscious experiences.
What’s my confusion? Whether or not I should introspectively recognise that I am conscious and that it has an inherent qualitative (and normative, and valenced!) character, this is not a scientific argument: it’s a philosophical argument based on appeal to people introspecting and finding our certain normative truths about their qualia.
Firstly, this seems to be making things too easy for yourself. You can’t just say ‘We all know we have intrinsically valenced phenomenal consciousness and these intrinsically valenced conscious experiences are all purely material… IOU one account of the relation between private conscious experiences and material science.’
But the main point here is that the claims about consciousness that your argument relies on are not “entirely scientific”, I’m not sure they’re even at all scientific. It’s not clear at all how you would translate “good”/”bad”/”value” into material, scientific terms. Note that this is a distinct point from saying that you lack an account of how representational content reduce to neural structures- the point here is that the terms contained in your claim about consciousness are all entirely non-scientific.
See my first and second responses above. I don’t think freedom from oppression are simply derivatively valued based on their implications for positively valenced conscious experience. One can have more positive conscious experience under conditions of oppression, injustice, lack of freedom etc. and yet prefer to be free of oppression etc. Likewise retribution or desert judgements are not about conscious experience (indeed they’re sometimes about solely worsening conscious experience). Similarly judgements about fairness are non-reducible to judgements about conscious experience. It is commonplace for the fair thing to diverge from the positive conscious experience promoting thing. Scientific investigation of conscious experiences doesn’t even begin to tell us why it’s unjust to keep someone in a perpetually drugged state so that a gang of people can have their way with them.
How do you avoid relativism? Suppose Bill and Ben share a house, and Bill says that the reliable but hard to repair (and so on) plumbing option is best and Ben says the less reliable but easy to repair (and so on) plumbing option is best. A plausible analysis of such cases is that which plumbing solution is “best” makes sense only relative to the values of Bill, Ben or some other imagined valuer. What scientific investigation settles which is the best plumbing option or whether they are both (by chance) exactly equally good plumbing solutions? Of course, one can be a pluralist non-relativist, but I don’t see the motivation for the view in cases like this. It’s all very well to say “When my faucet spews water I don’t tell guests, “Who are you to say your plumbing is better than mine?” (after all, few people value maximising water leaks) but the same rhetorical force does not extend to things like the Bill/Ben case. Indeed it strikes me as weird to think that there is a determinate and objective “best” plumbing solution (or multiple solutions identically tied for best) and successful plumbing certainly doesn’t require it.