On the nature of ethics

[musicheck]

I'm not sure I can accept the way bluewing has even framed the question in the first place. There are definitely some metaphysical assumptions here that I'm not sure I like.

First of all, I'd like to attack the notion that there are "things" that are in and of themselves "good" or "bad." As first pointed out by AJ Ayer, to say that something is good or bad is not an empirical statement- there is no well defined test based on sensory experience we could carry out to see if such a statement holds. Thus, from a positivist perspective, ethical statements are meaningless. Statements such as "killing is right" and "charity is wrong" are not about killing and charity themselves so much as they are about our emotional reactions to killing and charity. To define ethics as the discipline that is concerned with what is right and what is wrong presupposes the existence of well-defined categories "right" and "wrong" which exist a priori- our job is just to figure out how to put the world in these categories. This is getting awfully close to presupposing platonic metaphysics to even get ethics started in the first place. The existence of such categories is not an empirical question. I would assert that from a positivist perspective, ethical claims are not true or false.

I would also like to contest the claim that the ultimate goal of all human activity is the acquisition of happiness. From an evolutionary perspective, the animal that maximizes its own chance of survival and reproduction is the one that is most likely to pass on its genes, not the animal that is the most happy. Thus, it follows that our behaviors and emotions are designed in a manner that will lead to action that preserves the survival of our species. Achievement of long term happiness is not conducive to maximizing survival chances if a strong dose of fear and self-hatred is useful in getting us to go out into the wild and go hunting. Furthermore, the structure of our brain, designed by evolutionary forces, is not designed to fit into a simple philosophical model of human behavior. As argued in "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert, we simply do not know what makes us happy much of the time. If we are to take bluewing's ethical system then, we simply do not have any way of learning about ethics, because we are unreliable judges of our own future happiness.-
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I'd also like to propose an alternative formulation of ethics, based upon Wittgenstein's assertion that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same. The foundation of ethics is the alogical (but most certainly NOT illogical) "value judgement" that something is ethical or unethical. To say that something is ethical is a statement about your perception of the aesthetic value of the world, not a statement about the object itself. Killing is wrong because there is something emotionally awful about the destruction of another life, and the only foundation of such a judgement is our emotional response, which is independent of logic and reason. This is entirely analogous to how we judge a work of art, whether a picture of a puppy is adorable, or anything else that is not solely empirical.

This alogical foundation of our ethics is not exactly the subject matter of studying ethics. While fundamentally it is this emotional foundation that is really what matters, we cannot speak of it directly. This is where human empathy becomes useful. Whether philosophical discussion, art and literature, or less "highbrow" (but not less valuable) methods are at hand, the purpose of ethics is to extract the commonalities of our ethical/aesthetic reactions to the world. Language and culture are organic entities based upon the signaling games we play to coordinate our inner emotional states. We cannot talk about these states directly, but human behavior and its empathic foundation allow us some power in communicating them, even if they must exist outside of the method of their communication. I would define an action to be ethical if that is simply the consensus value judgment expressed in a culture. "In a culture" is needed so that these methods of communication can actually coordinate people's emotional states, since there is no good notion of consensus of people who have no method of agreeing or disagreeing.

 

[SolitaryWalker]

I'm not sure I can accept the way bluewing has even framed the question in the first place. There are definitely some metaphysical assumptions here that I'm not sure I like..

I defined right as simply what conduces to the long-term happiness of the individual. Ayer's criticism of the 'good' and 'bad', 'right' or 'wrong' notions are not relevant to how I have defined them. Ayer was only concerned with the way they tend to be defined in literature. The way I have defined them is clearly different from that.

First of all, I'd like to attack the notion that there are "things" that are in and of themselves "good" or "bad." As first pointed out by AJ Ayer, to say that something is good or bad is not an empirical statement- there is no well defined test based on sensory experience we could carry out to see if such a statement holds...

What is clearly true is that certain things make certain people experience positive emotion. Other things lead people to experience negative emotions. For example, eating chocolate, under certain circumstances makes certain people feel pleasure. This does not mean that chocolate in itself is good, it means that chocolate could be used to produce pleasure. I define good as the same as long-term pleasure.

Ayer asserted that there is no empirical way to test what activities conduce to long term happiness? Ayer also asserted that it is not possible to empirically test under what circumstances people experience pleasure?

That strikes me as unpersuasive. We could amass a crowd of people who shall volunteer to engage in a number of experiences. Such as for example eating chocolate, or riding bicycles. After each activity, they will report their emotive state to us. They will tell us for example that before they have embarked upon the activity they felt a certain way, and they will report how they felt after they have completed the activity. If we for instance notice a correlation between people who first reported they were feeling slightly depressed, and after having consumed chocolate, their mood elevated, we could state that under certain circumstances eating chocolate conduces to pleasure.

We could conduct further elaborate studies with regard to acquisition of insight concerning what activities induce positive emotion within people in relation to their circumstances and their personal dispositions. As a result of such studies we shall have a more clear idea regarding what activities conduce to happiness.

Hence, activities that do conduce to happiness are right or good.

If it is possible for us to know what activities do conduce to happiness or do generate positive emotion, ethics, as I have defined the term is possible.

I would assert that from a positivist perspective, ethical claims are not true or false....

I ate chocolate last night and I felt good after I did so. This statement can be regarded as true or false.

I would also like to contest the claim that the ultimate goal of all human activity is the acquisition of happiness. ....

Your claim has been noted.

From an evolutionary perspective, the animal that maximizes its own chance of survival and reproduction is the one that is most likely to pass on its genes, not the animal that is the most happy. Thus, it follows that our behaviors and emotions are designed in a manner that will lead to action that preserves the survival of our species. ....

What you have rightly pointed out is that our strongest unconscious tendency is to propagate. However, the reason why we are motivated to propagate, or in the strictest sense of the word to breed is because we associate a positive sentiment with the instinct to breed. Hence, the acquisition of happiness or positivity of sentiment is the reason why we wish to propagata. In condensed form, we would not have such a strong drive to propagata if doing so did not generate a positive sentiment.

Furthermore, the structure of our brain, designed by evolutionary forces, is not designed to fit into a simple philosophical model of human behavior. ....

I am not sure if I understand the idea that you have in mind. I am not suggesting one model to be adapted by all persons. What conduces to the lont-term happiness of the individual depends on his psychological dispositions and his extrinsic circumstances. What may work for one person may not work for the other.

It is clearly the case that it is possible to devise a model of behavior for each person, granted that we have all the necessary information about each person, that will conduce to his happiness more than any other course of action.

As argued in "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert, we simply do not know what makes us happy much of the time.....

That is true. However, this will change after a very careful investigation of this phenomenon.

If we are to take bluewing's ethical system then, we simply do not have any way of learning about ethics, because we are unreliable judges of our own future happiness.-.....

That appears to be what Gilbert has suggested. However, there is nothing in my writings that suggests that we incapable of knowing what makes us happy. I have maintained the opposite of this, namely that critical analysis of our psychological dispositions and our external circumstances will enable us to know what is conducive to our long term happiness.
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I'd also like to propose an alternative formulation of ethics, based upon Wittgenstein's assertion that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same..-.....

Certainly a thesis worth discussing.

The foundation of ethics is the alogical (but most certainly NOT illogical) "value judgement" that something is ethical or unethical. To say that something is ethical is a statement about your perception of the aesthetic value of the world, not a statement about the object itself...-.....

Indeed. However, we are concerned here not with the object, but with how the object relates to your pursuit of happiness. We are concerned with what kind of an emotional reaction an object emits within you. The moral worth of an activity is determined by how much it conduces to your long-term happiness.

 

[musicheck]

I defined right as simply what conduces to the long-term happiness of the individual. Ayer's criticism of the 'good' and 'bad', 'right' or 'wrong' notions are not relevant to how I have defined them.

There is nothing wrong with your definition, but it does not sidestep Ayer's criticism. You now have this new notion "long term happiness" to play with instead of "right"- definitions are simply a way of turning language into other language and never entirely solve your problem.

Ayer asserted that there is no empirical way to test what activities conduce to long term happiness? Ayer also asserted that it is not possible to empirically test under what circumstances people experience pleasure?

While Ayer never said exactly this, I think he would agree that until we have a good empirical meaning of happiness (whether its brain chemistry, psychological tests, or something else we use as our measure) that claims about what does and does not make people happy would be empirically meaningless. The way people use the word "happiness" in everyday conversation is so complex and varied that I don't think that maximizing happiness is a particularly sound foundation for an ethical system.

After each activity, they will report their emotive state to us.

How exactly will this work? You can't assume there's this thing called our emotive state that is well-defined and communicable. Who says people can even in principle report such a thing?

In condensed form, we would not have such a strong drive to propagata if doing so did not generate a positive sentiment.

From an evolutionary perspective, you have the causality wrong. Because animals who reproduce are the ones that continue existing, it is evolutionarily useful for us to be made happy by reproduction. My point here is that our emotional state is structured with the preservation of our species as the goal, and that happiness or unhappiness is just an accidental byproduct of this process. Furthermore, our brain structure, which I personally believe is the foundation of all concious experience, evolved in a way to maximize our survival. Thus, because our conciousness is implicitly designed with the goal of survival, there need not be any sort of order to our mental states that can be reduced to something like "happiness." Language is simply too clean to directly deal with the self-referential mess of conciousness that we evolved. Because of the essentially accidental structure of our thoughts, I don't even in principle think there is any way to know how happy someone is. I don't think emotions (or even holistic mental states) have any absolute metaphysical identity. The brain is built for decentralized processing, so I don't think its easy to assign any adjectives to its holistic state.


Overall, I think you need to be skeptical of intuitive concepts such as happiness as being able to truly describe our psychological state. Any philosophy based on "folk psychology" as describing human nature will necessarily be just as ill-defined as the vocabulary it uses. I don't think so much that we are mistaken about what makes us happy in the long run so much as I don't even think such a concept really is meaningful on a foundational level.

 

[SolitaryWalker]

There is nothing wrong with your definition, but it does not sidestep Ayer's criticism. You now have this new notion "long term happiness" to play with instead of "right"- definitions are simply a way of turning language into other language and never entirely solve your problem..

The idea that you seem to have in mind is that emotive gratification or happiness is a very fuzzy notion. For this reason, we are unable to accurately depict it. That is true. However, it is certainly not the case that we have no idea at all with regard to how happy we may feel. If it was the case that we truly do not know anything at all about our emotive state, we would not bother having conversations like, "how are you", or "does this work for you", and so on. When someone says, "yes, this is better", what they mean is indeed this makes them happier. Of course they do not know exactly to what degree it makes them happier or why it does, as this notion is fuzzy, yet it is manifest that they have some knowledge with regard to their emotive state. Let me provide an even simpler example. A patient in the hospital who is afflicted with severe pain is constantly screaming, if he were to be asked how he could be helped, he would state that he wishes to receive pain-killers. After having taken the pain-killers, the patient will report a much more content state of mind. This shows that to a certain degree we are indeed capable of gauging the level of positive emotion within us.

How exactly will this work? You can't assume there's this thing called our emotive state that is well-defined and communicable. Who says people can even in principle report such a thing?.

If that was the case, we would have no reason at all to provide pain-killers to the patients in agony. This claim appears to be manifestly false.

From an evolutionary perspective, you have the causality wrong.?.

It is persuasive that our strongest drive is to reproduce. However, the question that I ask is, what does it mean to have a drive? Or what does it mean to be motivated. In order to be incited into action, one needs to have positive emotion associated with the action. As one naturally gravitates towards actions that make one feel good. This is the case even for the masochists, who shall report an increased level of positive emotion after having imposed self-punishment upon themselves.

We associate positive emotion with activities akin to reproduction. The reason why this appears to be true is because our unconscious mind is very disorganized. The drive to reproduce is very complex. It requires careful deliberation for one to concoct a plan which will lead to successful reproduction. In short, one needs to think in a structured manner in order to cocncot a complex plan that one needs in order to reproduce. One cannot have such a plan ingrained in one's instincts because our unconscious mind tends not to work in a purposeful fashion. Feeling good is a very simple notion, in order for one to desire that, structured thinking is not required. Yet structured thinking is required to have an idea of what it means to propagate and how exactly one could achieve propagation.

Let me provide an example. Suppose we are studying the most primitive species possible. For the sake of the example, lets assume that they are the very first species. They have not learned any skills necessary to survive, they have no idea at all what means to survive, or whether or not it is desirable at all. When they taste strawberry for example, they feel good, and it is a very simple sensation that they can easily recognize. They will eat strawberry again not because they feel it somehow conduces to their reproduction (they cannot possibly know anything about that), but because they remember having felt good after having eaten strawberry. Shortly after, the species will have experienced sexual intercourse, or by whatever other means they reproduce. The emotion they have associated with this activity was positive also. Hence, they chose to engage in that activity again for the same reason they chose to eat strawberry again. Only after a long period of time of having associated a positive sentiment with reproduction, the species were led to value reproduction. The positive sentiment associated with such reproduction was so strong that it became one of our strongest drives. For this reason today, the thinking of most animals appears to be structured in such a way that they inevitably gravitate towards propagation.

My point here is that our emotional state is structured with the preservation of our species as the goal, and that happiness or unhappiness is just an accidental byproduct of this process...

I have explained why exactly that is the case. Namely because self-preservation is associated with a highly positive sentiment. Without this thesis, the claim that the primary drive of man is to preserve oneself is foundationless. Hence, the conclusion that we have arrived at is that the fundamental unconscious drive of an animal is to seek pleasure, and self-preservation is a set of activities that the animal has deemed to be most conducive to generation of pleasure.

Furthermore, our brain structure, which I personally believe is the foundation of all concious experience, evolved in a way to maximize our survival....

Only because such an activity was deemed to be conducive to generation of positive sentiment within an animal.

Thus, because our conciousness is implicitly designed with the goal of survival, there need not be any sort of order to our mental states that can be reduced to something like "happiness."....

It was designed this way only because at some point animals were led to associate self-preservation with a positive sentiment. If this is not the case, what is the reason for such a design?

Language is simply too clean to directly deal with the self-referential mess of conciousness that we evolved. Because of the essentially accidental structure of our thoughts, I don't even in principle think there is any way to know how happy someone is. I don't think emotions (or even holistic mental states) have any absolute metaphysical identity. The brain is built for decentralized processing, so I don't think its easy to assign any adjectives to its holistic state.."....

Language is indeed very simple. However, the idea akin to "I feel good" (when someone gives me hot tea on a very cold day) or "I feel hot" when I go out on a hot summer day is very simple. Simple enough to depicted by our language.

 

[musicheck]

The examples you use to depict the possibility of reporting our emotional state definitely all work as you have described them. However, these are all situations where the word happiness is used in the context of real life, not as the foundation of a philosophical system. This is fundamentally where I quibble with how you use the word happiness- as something universal in and of itself. The "language-game" a patient and doctor play with the word pain allows them to synchronize their actions in a way to lead to good medical treatment. However, someone on a shrink's couch will use the word pain in a very different way- the rules of the language-game a shrink plays are different from the language-game a doctor plays with patients. Outside of such cultural context, I don't think you can necessarily ascribe meaning to words. My quibble is not with how vague everyday language is- language serves its purpose as it must. My problem is that you are taking this word "happiness" and making it so general as to become meaningless. When we ask "how are you" and similar such questions, there is a whole array of implicit contextual rules on how we use our words that are not present when we try to speak about abstract philosophical concepts.

I don't mean to insult, but I genuinely think you misunderstand evolutionary theory from your response. Natural selection is necessarily the only driving force of evolution- this positive sentiment you refer to is necessarily a byproduct that was created for the purpose of survival. I think you would have to invoke a notion of god to even have "positive sentiment" to mean something outside of the evolved consciousness (which was evolved for the purpose of survival, not for the purpose of happiness) of a specific creature.

 

[SolitaryWalker]

The examples you use to depict the possibility of reporting our emotional state definitely all work as you have described them. However, these are all situations where the word happiness is used in the context of real life, not as the foundation of a philosophical system. This is fundamentally where I quibble with how you use the word happiness- as something universal in and of itself. The "language-game" a patient and doctor play with the word pain allows them to synchronize their actions in a way to lead to good medical treatment. However, someone on a shrink's couch will use the word pain in a very different way- the rules of the language-game a shrink plays are different from the language-game a doctor plays with patients. Outside of such cultural context, I don't think you can necessarily ascribe meaning to words. My quibble is not with how vague everyday language is- language serves its purpose as it must. My problem is that you are taking this word "happiness" and making it so general as to become meaningless. When we ask "how are you" and similar such questions, there is a whole array of implicit contextual rules on how we use our words that are not present when we try to speak about abstract philosophical concepts...

Have you even read my OP?

Where on earth do you see evidence of me regarding happiness as a general claim? One that applies to all entities? I have specifically stated that what is desirable is what conduces to the positive sentiment of the individual. This means the individual only.

I do not mean to insult, but unfortunately such propositions are merely vagaries of your imagination.

I don't mean to insult, but I genuinely think you misunderstand evolutionary theory from your response..

Natural selection is necessarily the only driving force of evolution- this positive sentiment you refer to is necessarily a byproduct that was created for the purpose of survival...

You must explain how that is true. Furthermore the claim that you have failed to answer is how exactly we have a drive towards natural selection?

Do you mean to suggest that when a monkey likes strawberry it likes strawberry because it is thinking about how it should reproduce and not because it has an impulse that strawberry feels good?

I think you would have to invoke a notion of god to even have "positive sentiment" to mean something outside of the evolved consciousness (which was evolved for the purpose of survival, not for the purpose of happiness) of a specific creature.

I have no idea at all how the idea of god is useful to proposition that a positive sentiment is necessary to support the proposition that there is such a thing as a good feeling from the perspective of one animal, or one human being. On the contrary, your thesis would benefit from the idea of god. You maintain that we are merely designed in a way that our strongest drive is towards evolution, yet refuse to explain how that is the case. So, you might as well just say god designed us that way, and that is why the case is such.

You need to go back and respond to my argument which explains why we favor activities conducive to reproduction. In short, the thesis that the drive to reproduce is more influential than the drive for positivity of sentiment is just as absurd as claiming that a monkey likes strawberry because it knows strawberry conduces to the propagation of itself and not because the strawberry merely feels good. Quite intelligent such a monkey would be. Moreover, the proposition that the drive for reproduction is more influential in the psyche of an animal than the drive for a positive sentiment presupposes that an animal more easily accesses a complex idea (such as reproduction) than a simple idea (such as feeling good). This contravenes a truism with regard to basic principles of psychology. Animals more easily acquire skills and insights that are easier to understand than those that are complex.

 

[musicheck]

Have you even read my OP?

Where on earth do you see evidence of me regarding happiness as a general claim? One that applies to all entities? I have specifically stated that what is desirable is what conduces to the positive sentiment of the individual. This means the individual only.

What I'm challenging is the idea that the "positive sentiment of the individual" really refers to anything in particular at all.
The part of your OP that I'm contesting is

The most straight-forward answer to this question is the discipline that is concerned with what is right and what is wrong. The question to follow is, what exactly is right, and what exactly is wrong?

I propose that the ultimate goal of all human activity is acquisition of happiness. On a deeply unconscious level we are attracted to thoughts and actions that we feel will be beneficial to us.

Your statement "the ultimate goal of all human activity is happiness" is indeed extremely general- it proposes to explain all of human behavior. I understand that you do not think happiness needs to be the same for different people, but this is still a universal claim. What I'm suggesting is that even for a single individual, there isn't any well defined notion of happiness, even if its definition would apply only to this one person. If you define happiness to be what is attained by a person's actions, then your definition is circular and your philosophy is meaningless. I assert that there isn't any well defined goal to human action- that this sense we have of there being some executive control over our actions is an illusion.

To explain evolution, I think Understanding Evolution will do a much better job than anything I could write. Can you read over some of that and then tell me what you disagree with in my evolutionary argument? If I had to make a summary of what I'm saying, it would be that via natural selection, things that maximize survival are made to feel good, that emotion is a byproduct of survival of the fittest. While each organism will be driven by their own emotions, those emotions are designed so as to make the species survive, so survival is in some sense fundamental than happiness. The drive for happiness is a side effect of the drive for species survival.

My claim about god being necessary for what I thought you were arguing is needed because evolutionary processes are impersonal- they take place outside of the consciousness of a being. The things that make a creature happy are designed by natural selection. Thus, for there to be any notion of happiness in the impersonal process of evolution, you would need emotion to exist outside of an individual, so an extra consciousness would be needed.

You maintain that we are merely designed in a way that our strongest drive is towards evolution, yet refuse to explain how that is the case.

Reasoning
Premises:
1. By natural selection, traits which make survival of a species more likely will survive more often than traits that don't.
2. We have survived.
Conclusion
Thus, we have traits that have been useful to our survival. In particular, something will make a human happy if it is evolutionarily useful for a human to be made happy by it.

In short, the thesis that the drive to reproduce is more influential than the drive for positivity of sentiment is just as absurd as claiming that a monkey likes strawberry because it knows strawberry conduces to the propagation of itself and not because the strawberry merely feels good. Quite intelligent such a monkey would be. Moreover, the proposition that the drive for reproduction is more influential in the psyche of an animal than the drive for a positive sentiment presupposes that an animal more easily accesses a complex idea (such as reproduction) than a simple idea (such as feeling good).

The drive to survive and the drive to feel good are not at odds. We have evolved in a manner that makes things that feel good useful to our survival- this is a basic principle of evolution. The monkey is not consciously choosing things to make the monkey survive. If the monkey did not like the strawberry, the monkey wouldn't eat it. However, eating the strawberry helps the monkey survive. Thus, those monkeys that do not eat the strawberry will eventually die off, since the monkeys that do eat the strawberry are more likely to survive. Without any active choices by monkeys, natural selection has killed off the monkeys that don't like to eat. This process does not take place within the psyche of any specific monkey.

 

[SolitaryWalker]

What I'm challenging is the idea that the "positive sentiment of the individual" really refers to anything in particular at all.
The part of your OP that I'm contesting is .

What it refers to as follows. A monkey likes strawberry, that is a positive sentiment of the monkey. A monkey also likes water, that is the positive sentiment of the monkey also. A massochist likes pain. Hence, what this refers to is the psychological state of the animal.

I am not sure if I understand what you mean by 'anything in particular'.

Your statement "the ultimate goal of all human activity is happiness" is indeed extremely general- it proposes to explain all of human behavior. .

The statement that is clearly true is all that all animals and humans are capable of perceiving of what appears to them as the positive emotional state. In this regard such a general statement is appropriate, yet again, what makes one animal happy, is often very different from what makes another animal happy.

What I'm suggesting is that even for a single individual, there isn't any well defined notion of happiness, even if its definition would apply only to this one person. .

The well defined notion of happiness is as simple as a monkey receiving pleasure as a result of having consumed strawberry. If the monkey always has felt this way, the monkey would be considered happy. The notion of happiness has been established to mean exactly the same thing as the notion of positivity of sentiment which we have established is present in all animals.

I assert that there isn't any well defined goal to human action- that this sense we have of there being some executive control over our actions is an illusion. .

There certainly is not any clear-cut conscious goal to human action. As you mention the 'execution control', yet there is a very strong unconscious drive to feel content. This seems to be the significant misunderstanding we have incurred. I never maintained that humans have a conscious goal

If I had to make a summary of what I'm saying, it would be that via natural selection, things that maximize survival are made to feel good,.

That is correct. The question that I am interested in, is exactly WHY things that maximize survival are made to feel good. Let me concoct some examples to illustrate my point on this matter.

Suppose a monkey is attacked by another monkey. The attacking monkey attempts to suffocate the victim monkey. The monkey will obviously feel a very strong urge to avoid being suffocated, or a very strong urge to survive? Why is that? Because a monkey associates a very unpleasant feeling with being choked or with anything that it unconsciously associates with death.

Or how about, a strange animal was to be created in a laboratory and released into the wilderness in Africa. Such an animal does not enjoy any of the food available in the area it inhabits. As you pointed out earlier, if an animal does not like any of the food available, it will not survive. Therefore, the animal will have no choice but to force itself to like some kind of food as without this it will not survive. Once more, I ask, what impels the animal to do this? What is clearly true is that the only reason the animal wishes to avoid extinction, or wishes to survive is because the contrary result is painful. Unconsciously, the animal must seek the outcome that is most pleasurable.

Thus, my thesis is, the search for a positive sentiment is the reason why animals wish to survive. It preceeds the drive for survival for the reasons described above.

that emotion is a byproduct of survival of the fittest. While each organism will be driven by their own emotions, those emotions are designed so as to make the species survive, so survival is in some sense fundamental than happiness. The drive for happiness is a side effect of the drive for species survival.,.

What came first? The drive for survival? Or the drive for positive emotion? Moreover, if it was not for the drive for positive emotion and avoidance of negative emotion, is there any reason at all why the species would wish to survive?

they take place outside of the consciousness of a being.-.,.

I never said otherwise, as we have clarified in this post.

The things that make a creature happy are designed by natural selection..-.,.

As we have established, the creature is forced to like things that are necessary to survive, because failure to do so leads the creature to great pain, which it unconsciously strives to avoid.

Thus, for there to be any notion of happiness in the impersonal process of evolution, you would need emotion to exist outside of an individual, so an extra consciousness would be needed...-.,.

I have already stated. Happiness is merely a psychological state of an animal. What exactly is the impersonal process of evolution? Moreover, emotion by definition is a psychological state of an individual, how is it possible for such an entity to exist outside of an individual? Most importantly of all, how is any of this relevant to our discussion?

Premises:
1. By natural selection, traits which make survival of a species more likely will survive more often than traits that don't.
2. We have survived.
Conclusion
Thus, we have traits that have been useful to our survival. In particular, something will make a human happy if it is evolutionarily useful for a human to be made happy by it....-.,.

You have explained why the animals had a need to adjust to their environment.

In essence the argument has this form.

Premise: Animals adjust to their environment in order to survive.
Conclusion:Animals have embraced some psychological qualities such as appreciation of certain foods or environmental conditions that they did not appreciate before.


The argument needs to be expounded upon.

Premise 1: The strongest unconscious drive of all animals is the pursuit of positive sentiment, which means pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.
Premise 2: Because the animals wished to avoid pain, which extinction is associated with, they were forced to do whatever is necessary to avoid pain and extinction and as a result adapted to their external environment in order to survive.

Conclusion:Animals have embraced some psychological qualities such as appreciation of certain foods or environmental conditions that they did not appreciate before.

Thus my point is, once again, the reason why animals wish to survive is because they unconsciously seek out a positive sentiment. For the sake of the argument, lets assume that your thesis is true; namely that the drive to survive is completely independent of the drive to feel good. On that note, how shall it be explained WHY animals have the ambition to survive in the first place?


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Additional notes on the matter.

All animals have the ability to identify what pleasure is on a deeply unconscious level. Because this is the most fundamental drive of our unconscious mind, our pleasure is what we desire the most. That is what happiness is in particular the same psychological state of mind a monkey experiences after it ate strawberry.

Therefore, the most sensible way to pursue ethics or the study of what we should do with our lives (this definition is used as interchangeable with the study of right and wrong or good and bad, as the 4 previous terms are concerned with directing one's actions), is to critically evaluate what produces such positive sentiments within us and pursue activities that maximize such sentiments. The discussion we had about evolution was very interesting but almost completely irrelevant.The claim that the idea of happiness is completely meaningless is palpably absurd. If that was the case than our feeling of thirst would have no bearing upon our endeavor to drink water. Or our liking of strawberry would have no bearing upon our endeavor to eat strawberry. Or the philosopher's genuine appreciation of contemplation of ideas would have no bearing upon his studies of philosophy. Happiness does refer to something in particular and that is the state of mind of the individual, another name for which is merely pleasure. This state of mind prompts us to act in a certain way. In other words, we always act in way that we unconsciously feel will conduce to our happiness, or in colloquial terms, will feel good. That is the case for all of our activities from eating strawberry because we like or re-adjusting our tastes in order to survive. (Again, we are motivated to do this by our pursuit of pleasure which also entails avoidance of pain.)

It seems to be the case that you have thoroughly misunderstood Ayer. He quite correctly pointed out that our value judgments tell us more about the person who has made the value judgment than about the matter he commented on. If the person says chocolate is good it merely means that he likes chocolate and not that there is an objective quality of goodness about chocolate. Ayer however, never maintained that our value judgments have no epistemic value. The epistemic value that they do hold is with regard to our psychological state. Or in this case, the value judgment the aforementioned person made allows us to ask the question of why exactly he likes chocolate. The same epistemic methodology can be applied to all other assessments of value judgments.

Hence, the conclusion is, because such assessments could be made any person can study his emotive dispositions and discover what truly conduces to his happiness the most, and as a result of this maximize it. Why should he pursue happiness? As a matter of truism, every person's ultimate wish is to be happy, because this wish is established on a deeply unconscious level.


Axiom: Our most desirable activity is prolonged happiness.

Thesis: All of our actions should be aimed to the end of ensuring that we acquire such a state of mind.

 

[Nocapszy]

All physicists knowledgeable enough to understand what life and cognition is composed of agree that ethics (even by your definition) is irrational.

Reason is correct: You approach this all wrong.

 

[SolitaryWalker]

All physicists knowledgeable enough to understand what life and cognition is composed of agree that ethics (even by your definition) is irrational.

Reason is correct: You approach this all wrong.

Homeboy, do me a favor, spare yourself some dignity. Stay out of this thread, it is way over your head.

P.S

Physics has nothing at all to do with this discussion.

 

[musicheck]

What it refers to as follows. A monkey likes strawberry, that is a positive sentiment of the monkey. A monkey also likes water, that is the positive sentiment of the monkey also. A masochist likes pain. Hence, what this refers to is the psychological state of the animal.

I am not sure if I understand what you mean by 'anything in particular'.

This is not a definition. You are just giving examples. I think there's a bit of circular logic going on here. You're saying what positive sentiment by listing actions taken to acheive it, and then you say that the unconcious goal of all actions is positive sentiment. The "psychological state" of an animal is too complicated to be accurately describe simply by these concepts of happiness and positive sentiment. What I mean by saying that your definitions don't mean anything in particular is that they really aren't definitions at all- the way you use the words happiness and sentiment are essentially meaningless.

The statement that is clearly true is all that all animals and humans are capable of perceiving of what appears to them as the positive emotional state. In this regard such a general statement is appropriate, yet again, what makes one animal happy, is often very different from what makes another animal happy.

You say that this is "clearly true" yet give no evidence beyond our appeal to intuition. This is rather similar to what Wittgenstein called "the hardness of the logical must." You're philosophizing in your own thought patterns and deciding that the world MUST work that way since it would be illogical for it not to. This is an overly dogmatic way of doing philosophy. You've never experienced the conscious state of being a non-human animal. How can you even know if an earthworm experiences anything remotely similar to what we would call emotions? You might want to read http://www.clarku.edu/students/philosophyclub/docs/nagel.pdf if you haven't yet- Nagel's argument is quite relevant here.

The well defined notion of happiness is as simple as a monkey receiving pleasure as a result of having consumed strawberry. If the monkey always has felt this way, the monkey would be considered happy. The notion of happiness has been established to mean exactly the same thing as the notion of positivity of sentiment which we have established is present in all animals.

Happiness and positivity of sentiment are, as I've argued repeatedly, fundamentally meaningless concepts. Sure, when we use these words in everyday life they have meaning because of cultural context, but when you take natural language and try to stretch it into a philosophical theory, words tend to lose their meaning. To define happiness, you're now using the word "pleasure"- one psychological concept exchanged for another. What I'd suggest is that taken out of context, none of this psychological language means anything and that you cannot adequately describe emotions using your Spinozan style of axiomatics.

There certainly is not any clear-cut conscious goal to human action. As you mention the 'execution control', yet there is a very strong unconscious drive to feel content. This seems to be the significant misunderstanding we have incurred. I never maintained that humans have a conscious goal

How can you even know what our unconscious goals are? I'm arguing not that our goals are not conscious, but that there is no universal goal to human or animal activity whatsoever.

That is correct. The question that I am interested in, is exactly WHY things that maximize survival are made to feel good.

This happens because the animals whose emotions do not lead them to act in a way to preserve their species die off! This is the fundamental tenant of natural selection. A particular animal's psychology will not change because of evolutionary forces. However, over the course of many generations, only those animals whose emotional state is useful to their survival will be able to pass on their genes. If your emotions lead you not to try to survive, you won't survive. Thus, the animals which have survived are the ones whose emotions do lead them to try to survive and reproduce.

Suppose a monkey is attacked by another monkey. The attacking monkey attempts to suffocate the victim monkey. The monkey will obviously feel a very strong urge to avoid being suffocated, or a very strong urge to survive? Why is that? Because a monkey associates a very unpleasant feeling with being choked or with anything that it unconsciously associates with death.

Right! My point is that only monkeys that have this unpleasant associated with death are the ones that are left alive today. If the monkey did not have this unpleasant feeling, the monkey would go ahead and die. Thus, because all the monkeys alive today are monkeys who have not died yet, they must be monkeys who resist being strangled like this.

Therefore, the animal will have no choice but to force itself to like some kind of food as without this it will not survive.

This illustrates what I think you don't understand about evolution. This specific animal will simply die off. However, over generations of selection and reproduction, the conciousness of animals will slowly be shaped in a way that leads to those animals that try to survive being the only ones that remain.

Thus, my thesis is, the search for a positive sentiment is the reason why animals wish to survive. It preceeds the drive for survival for the reasons described above.

I agree with you that an animal's search for positive is part of why they survive. I disagree that it preceeds the drive for survival. The drive for survival takes place on an impersonal level across many generations of animals, and by natural selection, this drive can in fact over many generations determine what sensations will feel good to an animal.
If the Berkley guide to evolution did not make this clear to you, try this book:
Amazon.com: Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life: Daniel C. Dennett: Books
I'm still pretty convinced that you don't understand how evolution works, so try reading some of this stuff. To me, evolution is a big reason why ethics cannot be approached from a foundational perspective like you try to. Understanding this critique in depth (which Dennett makes much better than I ever could) will either give you more convincing reasons for your understanding of ethics or will show you your error- either way you can only benefit.

I have already stated. Happiness is merely a psychological state of an animal. What exactly is the impersonal process of evolution? Moreover, emotion by definition is a psychological state of an individual, how is it possible for such an entity to exist outside of an individual? Most importantly of all, how is any of this relevant to our discussion?

The reason evolution is important is that over generations, the emotions of animals can evolve just like any other trait. Our emotions are shaped by this process. Because in some sense evolutionary processes are (if you accept that evolution is the driving force in how life develops) in some sense the foundational reason for why our consciousness is the way it is. Note that this sort of foundational reason is grounded in an empirically observable process, so the critique I made about foundationalism being meaningless does not apply- our own sensory perception could show us that evolutionary processes did not occur if in fact they did not, so there is actually a statement about how the world works here.

You have explained why the animals had a need to adjust to their environment.

No- my point is that the species adjusts, not a specific animal. If this does not make sense to you, I can state with certainty that you do not understand evolution. (caveat: I figure in an INTP/INTP dicussion, it goes without saying that this is not meant as a personal insult. I still respect your intelligence etc etc)

The argument needs to be expounded upon.

Read Dennett's book.

For the sake of the argument, lets assume that your thesis is true; namely that the drive to survive is completely independent of the drive to feel good. On that note, how shall it be explained WHY animals have the ambition to survive in the first place?

My point is not that the two are independent but that the drive to feel good is simply a part of the drive for a species to survive. Our emotions evolve over many generations just like any other characteristic.

 

[musicheck]

Homeboy, do me a favor, spare yourself some dignity. Stay out of this thread, it is way over your head.

P.S

Physics has nothing at all to do with this discussion.

Just because Nocapszy doesn't feel like spending his time having a long drawn out discussion doesn't mean he/she is unintelligent. I happen to agree with both Nocapszy and Reason- I'm just stating my counterargument in a lot more detail because I enjoy doing so.

 

[SolitaryWalker]

This is not a definition. You are just giving examples. .

I will provide a definition.

Happiness: A sentiment that an animal regards as affirmative of its ways.

Clarification: Whatever an animal is excited by, it welcomes. On that note we may describe that we derive positive energy (as many use the term) from activities that bring us pleasure. For example, in our case it is intellectual discussions. In the case of an athlete it is running. In the case of a monkey it is eating strawberry.

An interesting observation to be made is that the reason why the animals seem to have such a strong drive towards survival is because only by surviving can they be affirmed. Obviously, if they fail to survive, they cannot engage in any other activity. That means they cannot be affirmed.

Arthur Schopenhauer had an interesting take on this matter and his philosophy of biology was the only one that was written before Darwin's time that was supported by the theory of evolution.

Arthur Schopenhauer (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

He argued that the essence of all things, living and non-living is the Will. Which could be interpreted as simply the energy.

He maintained that the greatest ambition of the will is self-promotion, or what we may call survival. He called this the 'Will to live'. But he often used such phraseology as interchangeable with affirmation.

If his claim is true, than there is certainly an intimate connection between the drive for affirmation and the drive for survival. Schopenhauer does not exactly explain why we have the Will to live, he merely propounds it as an axiom of his system.

It is certainly plausible that the will to live and the will to be affirmed are not distinct, but are actually the same thing. Let me provide an example to illustrate the point more clearly. Schopenhauer regards the Will as a cosmical force that dwells nearly in all things. When a Will is undermined, or a step is made towards the non-existence of the Will, the Will protests. One may say that the Will protests because it strives for affirmation the most which is actually the same as a positive sentiment, but since the Will is all that exists, to give affirmation to the Will and to make a step towards survival mean the same thing.

On that note, there is no distinction between the drive for positive sentiment and the drive for survival as these are merely different phrases that depict the same idea.

I think there's a bit of circular logic going on here. You're saying what positive sentiment by listing actions taken to acheive it, and then you say that the unconcious goal of all actions is positive sentiment. .

I do not see the circularity in my reasoning. Point it out to me as clearly and as thoroughly as possible.

I am not clear with regard to what you meant in your second sentence either. However, if we assume that the drive to survive is the most fundamental of all drives within the mind of an animal, in effect we maintain that the drive for affirmation is the most fundamental. As aforementioned, the two phrases merely mean the same thing.

The "psychological state" of an animal is too complicated to be accurately describe simply by these concepts of happiness and positive sentiment. What I mean by saying that your definitions don't mean anything in particular is that they really aren't definitions at all- the way you use the words happiness and sentiment are essentially meaningless..

I am familiar with Nagel's essay 'What it is like to be a bat', but I just do not buy it! Daniel Dennet, with whose work we are both very familiar with provided a plausible refutation of positions reminiscent of that of Nagel. He did so in Consciousness Explained. He has specifically discussed such a refutation in this interview.

Daniel Dennett


His position is as follows. If a group of psychologists were to observe me for many days with great care, based on my reactions to various external stimuli, they would be able to understand why I behave the way that I do. It is certainly true that our phenomenological perceptions differ, however, they are similar enough for us to believe that we inhabit a similar reality.

For example, if I see you getting uncomfortable as a result of hot weather, I can imagine what you must feel like because my experiences with regard to hot weather are similar to yours for the reasons mentioned above.

Are the experiences of monkeys different from ours? Certainly, but because we are able to interact with them, we know that there are some distinct similarities. For instance, we are able to respond to the monkey's signals which seem to be requesting water, food, or other kinds of assistance.

You say that this is "clearly true" yet give no evidence beyond our appeal to intuition. This is rather similar to what Wittgenstein called "the hardness of the logical must." You're philosophizing in your own thought patterns and deciding that the world MUST work that way since it would be illogical for it not to. This is an overly dogmatic way of doing philosophy. You've never experienced the conscious state of being a non-human animal. How can you even know if an earthworm experiences anything remotely similar to what we would call emotions? You might want to read http://www.clarku.edu/students/philosophyclub/docs/nagel.pdf if you haven't yet- Nagel's argument is quite relevant here...

See above. Moreover, if you wish to maintain that we cannot know anything about how the mind of an animal must work, you cannot maintain that the drive for survival is the strongest drive in the mind of an animal. If the passage I have quoted above is true, theory of evolution is irrelevant to zoology.

Happiness and positivity of sentiment are, as I've argued repeatedly, fundamentally meaningless concepts....

If that was true, the ill patient in the hospital would not receive the treatment that he usually receives. If happiness or positivity of sentiment truly had no meaning at all to us, physicians would have no concept at all with regard to enhacing the health of the patient.

Sure, when we use these words in everyday life they have meaning because of cultural context, but when you take natural language and try to stretch it into a philosophical theory, words tend to lose their meaning. ....

What kind of meaning are we loosing here?

To define happiness, you're now using the word "pleasure"- one psychological concept exchanged for another.....

I have assigned the same meaning to both terms, for rhetorical purposes I have used two words, I could have attained the same result if I had used only the word pleasure or only the word happiness in all cases.

What I'd suggest is that taken out of context, none of this psychological language means anything and that you cannot adequately describe emotions using your Spinozan style of axiomatics. .....

Our experiences with medicine shows for this to be false. Physicians have very detailed and rigorously outlined procedures with regard to what actions must be carried out in order to ensure that the health of the patient improves. You certainly cannot describe emotions with the same precision we dscribe mathematical concepts, or epistemic concepts, but our descriptions of our emotional states are precise enough to be useful.

How can you even know what our unconscious goals are? I'm arguing not that our goals are not conscious, but that there is no universal goal to human or animal activity whatsoever. .....

I should not say that this is the goal of all human activity, but certainly the strongest of them all. The strongest unconscious aim. The question for you is, is the next statement false? Inevitably, all species strive more for survival or self-affirmation than for any other activity. It certainly is plausible to infer that observation of the behavior of animals shows that they seem content only when their life is not endangered or only when they are affirmed, or are able to do things that make them feel content. Animals are unhappy when the opposite of this happens.

The claim that there is not one strongest unconscious aim in the minds of animals seems to me idiosyncratic to say the least as our observations clearly suggest that this is not so.


So, my point is, if ethics could not be approached the way that I approach them. How else could they be approached. We still need to answer questions like, what do I want to do with my life? What laws must we pass in society?

If you are correct that we do not have enough precision in our descriptions of our emotive states, how could the above questions be answered. Ethics in that case would indeed be completely useless. In this case we should stop thinking about how we could make good laws or how we could live fulfilling lives. Are we prepared for this? Unlikely, we still wish to make decisions that will benefit us with regard to such questions, and seems to me the only way we could make good decisions in that regard is if we are able to properly assess what makes us happy, and do what makes us happy.

Accordingly, if I were to ask an ethical question with regard to how I could live my life in a fulfilling my fashion, I certainly need to know what makes me happy, as fulfilling and happy are very close in meaning. If I were to ask a question with regard to how we can pass good laws, we certainly need to be concerned with what makes people as a group happy. Obviously a good law is one that benefits society the most. Such laws could not be established without an assessment of what makes people happy. My argument above seems to have shown that ethical nihilism is false, consider the argument in which I have used medicine as an example to better illustrate my point. More specifically how doctors are able to concoct reliable ways to assess and ensure of the well being of the patient.

Ethical nihilism is the thesis that in all cases ethical propositions are meaningless or have no epistemic value. If at least one ethical proposition has epistemic vlaue, than ethical nihilism is false. The physician can claim that he is able to understand the ethical value judgments of the patient, such as 'I feel good' or 'I will feel good if you give me this kind of a treatment'. He can prove that he understands such ethical value judgments by conducting procedures that directly and purposefully influence the well being of the patient. In this regard the physicians knowledge of the ethical value judgments of the patient or what he must do in order to make the patient feel a certain way, are analogous to the mechanic's knowledge of the functionality of the car, or what he must do to the car to make it function a certain way.

Moreover, if ethical value judgments are meaningless, it would also be the case that we do not have reliable ways of influencing how other people tend to emote. The experiences of comedians and con artists clearly show for this to be false as they have very elaborate ways of evoking certain emotions from their audience.

In order for my ethical system to be true, it has to be shown that it is possible to assess one's current emotional state with regard to happiness and how it ought to be maximized. If we can perform such tasks for emotions I have described above, there is no reason why such tasks could not be performed with regard to the emotion of happiness, as such an emotion is not different in its intrinsic make up from the emotions described above. A summary of my argument for the essence of ethics is that it is both possible and desirable to maximize our happiness and the most reliable way to accomplish this is by virtue of critical analysis of our inner being and our external circumstances.

Just because Nocapszy doesn't feel like spending his time having a long drawn out discussion doesn't mean he/she is unintelligent. I happen to agree with both Nocapszy and Reason- I'm just stating my counterargument in a lot more detail because I enjoy doing so.

I agree that what you have observed does not warrant the claim that Nocapszy is unintelligent. Yet, I have every confidence that you will appreciate my point after having read more of his posts. Reason's concern seemed to be that my system does not solve any ethical problem in particular. My answer was that I provide a method which could be used to solve any particular ethical problem, or all of them.

 

[musicheck]

I'm going to need to read/watch what you've linked pretty carefully to state my point clearly, so I might not respond here for a day or two.

 

[Hirsch63]

"I propose that the ultimate goal of all human activity is acquisition of happiness. On a deeply unconscious level we are attracted to thoughts and actions that we feel will be beneficial to us."

Happiness once acquired will likely result in a desire for continued happiness. Ethics are the machinery of "happiness maintanence" in a socially complicated world. I do not believe that ethics need to be based in a "moral" framework to be valid. They need not have recourse to an abstract sentiment. They are simply good sense and practical husbandry in a world who's reality must be aknowledged.

Ethics I imagine would be relative to a political or economic reality where the standard of happiness would be relative. And in this sense certainly should be carfeully reasoned and considered within that dynamic structure.

True unfettered happiness where every whim is pleasantly fulfilled and personal security could only be imperiled by accident would leave us in a reality where using our minds reflectively may not be truly needed or encouraged. Is that beneficial? for our corporeal selves perhaps. Are we consciously drawn to what makes us happy or what keeps us happy? Which is what we need and which is what we want? which is beneficial? Benefit is controlled by circumstance and circumstance of course changes....so some sort of structure or code may aid us in mainatining a degree of happiness should circumstances evolve beyond our concerns.

To pursue one's happiness without regard for consequence to other being's or the sustainability of our demands on our environs within a socially complex structure would almost certainly lead to conflict which may result in dire consequences. Happiness would likely end abruptly. Is that wrong? I cannot say. Is it unethical? If the purpose of an ethical framework is to sustain a given level of happiness and moreover the prospect that more happiness may be gained at a later date then such apparently ill considered self indulgence is indeed unethical.

 

[Salomé]

Physics has nothing at all to do with this discussion.

Quantum Ethics? - Suffering in the Multiverse


Superhappiness

 

[musicheck]

I will provide a definition.

Happiness: A sentiment that an animal regards as affirmative of its ways.

This definition doesn't really say anything. What is a sentiment? What does it mean for an animal to regard something as affirmative of its ways? The problem is that we are applying vocabulary that is useful in discussing human consciousness and generalizing it to somewhere where we have no reason to assume it applies. My fundamental point is that you can't really define words in a fundamental way (definitions use other words), so out of context words do not have meaning. This is my basic problem with your universal method of dealing with all ethical issues- when we speak in abstract terms "happiness" really doesn't mean anything specific. We need a culture or "language-game" in which the word can be used if we are to say anything worthwhile.

An interesting observation to be made is that the reason why the animals seem to have such a strong drive towards survival is because only by surviving can they be affirmed. Obviously, if they fail to survive, they cannot engage in any other activity. That means they cannot be affirmed.

Again, you have the causality in evolution wrong. Animals that are not "affirmed" by surviving did not survive, so only animals that are affirmed by survival are the ones that are left over. When we are speaking in generality about all animals, this drive to be affirmed is so general and so vague as to be entirely unfalsifiable (my point about a "language-game" being necessary is again relevant).

Arthur Schopenhauer (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

He argued that the essence of all things, living and non-living is the Will. Which could be interpreted as simply the energy.

Again, the Will is general, universal, and entirely meaningless. Ever since Wittgenstein, this sort of thinking has been essentially debunked.

I do not see the circularity in my reasoning. Point it out to me as clearly and as thoroughly as possible.

You define happiness as "A sentiment that an animal regards as affirmative of its ways." Then you say that all animals strive for happiness. Thus, you're defining happiness by the way that an animal behaves, and then you say that an animal's behavior is determined by its striving for happiness. Thus, an animal behaves how an animal behaves.

I am familiar with Nagel's essay 'What it is like to be a bat', but I just do not buy it! Daniel Dennet, with whose work we are both very familiar with provided a plausible refutation of positions reminiscent of that of Nagel. He did so in Consciousness Explained. He has specifically discussed such a refutation in this interview.

I agree with Dennet's refutation of Nagel's argument about the experience of being a bat being proof that consciousness is not fundamentally physical. However (and I was somewhat unclear about this), the point I was trying to make was that even though it can be explained physically and that qualia don't really exist, the subjective experience of being SolitaryWalker need not be anything like the subjective experience of being a bat. The ideas you have about yourself, such as the idea that you can have something called "happiness", might very well not be useful concepts in discussing the consciousness of a bat. The fundamental purpose of all of this reasoning on my part is to provide evidence that you can't define happiness out of context- you have to experience your conciousness and use language the way you do for the word to mean what you think it does. Thus, the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental drive in human and animal nature is a meaningless assertion- you've pushed everyday language into a universal place where it should not go.

See above. Moreover, if you wish to maintain that we cannot know anything about how the mind of an animal must work, you cannot maintain that the drive for survival is the strongest drive in the mind of an animal. If the passage I have quoted above is true, theory of evolution is irrelevant to zoology.

My point is not that we cannot know anything, but that the language we use to describe our intuitive sense of our own consciousness should not necessarily be generalized to the consciousness of other beings. My point is linguistic, not neurological- the problem I have is with you using a single word "happiness" as the fundamental goal of animal behavior. To say that every animal wants happiness is not wrong so much as it is meaningless- you've twisted the word so far out of context that it means nothing. Thus, since your ethical system is based on maximizing happiness, because happiness is a meaningless concept when considered in abstract generality, your ethical system is therefore also fundamentally meaningless. Furthermore, I would propose that ALL systems that claim to be a basis for all of ethics are necessarily meaningless for precisely the same reason- when we push language into too general of a context, where we do not have a well defined cultural context or "language-game", words lose their meaning.
What more is there to the meaning of a word than its use?

If that was true, the ill patient in the hospital would not receive the treatment that he usually receives. If happiness or positivity of sentiment truly had no meaning at all to us, physicians would have no concept at all with regard to enhacing the health of the patient.

But a doctor and a patient have a very simple language game that they play! If the patient says "it hurts in my leg", the doctor responds by examining the leg. The doctor might ask "is it a sharp or dull pain?" but the doctor will never follow that up with "what does it mean for a pain to be sharp?". If you start questioning the words too much, the rules of the game don't apply anymore and the words start to become irrelevant. These rules are never written down- indeed if you accept that you need a language game for words to have meaning then you could never totally write down all the rules, since the language the rules would be written in would have to be part of another language game. However, there doesn't have to be a precise, abstract definition of pleasure and pain for a doctor and patient to interact satisfactorily- it is the use of the words in that interaction that supplies its meaning, and outside of such an interaction there is no meaning.
The doctor and patient do just fine without any overarching ethical system like the one you propose.

 

[SolitaryWalker]

The doctor and patient do just fine without any overarching ethical system like the one you propose.

I am still not clear with regard to what an overarching ethical system is, or something that is 'fundamental'. Fundamental to what exactly?

Moreover, you can certainly claim that a system of ethics cannot exist without culturally inscribed language games. However, everything requires culture inscribed language games as without language no meaningful discourse could be possible.

What you said about ethics is true about all subjects that we study. On that note, 'language games' with regard to ethics could be applied to all living creatures, and in that regard ethics are universal. What I mean here is exactly that we are able to define what happiness is with our language, and the same definition could apply to all creatures. On that note, a physician could be in tune with the feelings of animals or all creatures and behave in a way that conduces to their happiness with the way we have defined the word.

Why are the sentiments of an animal relevant in this case? My argument was that happiness, as I have defined it is attainable. The drive for such a state of mind as I have defined it, leads back to the instinct within our nature that all animals also share.

With regard to causality in evolution, is it even possible for an animal not to be affirmed by existence? To say that an animal is not affirmed by existence is basically to say the animal has no will to exist, therefore it is not possible for such an animal to exist.

In summary, I have two points to make, no meaningful discourse is possible without 'language games' not just ethical discourse. Secondly, any animal that exists, wills to exist, as otherwise it would not be possible for such an animal to exist in the first place. If that is not so, provide a counter-example to my thesis.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additional notes: Daniel Dennet, in the long interview I have sent to you have pointed out that if a group of psychologists were to observe him for many days, they would know what it is like to be Daniel Dennet better than he did himself. This undermines Nagel's argument that there is something fundamentla to my consciousness, or about the consciousness of a bat that only I can have knowledge of. Actually, the other conversationist suggested the contrary to what Daniel Dennet has propounded, though after Dennet explained the views I have described in this paragraph, his interlocutor had no objection.

You mentioned that you accept Dennet's refutation of Nagel's thesis that his thought experiment concerning the consciousness of bats shows that consciousness is not purely physical. Do you also accept Dennet's claim above? If not, why not? If you do accept it, you cannot make the assertion that the terms we use to describe our own emotions are meaningless when we talk of consciousness of other animals, such as bats. As Veterinarians shall attest, Dennet's thesis appears to be true, which is one's intrinsic emotive state could be extrapolated from how one interacts with the external world. Because it is true, the following proposition is warranted. I do not need to be a dog in order to know what it is like for a dog to feel pain. I merely need to observe a dog.

You define happiness as "A sentiment that an animal regards as affirmative of its ways." Then you say that all animals strive for happiness. Thus, you're defining happiness by the way that an animal behaves, and then you say that an animal's behavior is determined by its striving for happiness. Thus, an animal behaves how an animal behaves..

Indeed, can you imagine any other way to define what an animal tends to strive for? Some propositions are not supported by argument, they are axioms of the system. The drive for contentment is an axiom of animal nature. You may argue that the reason why animals have a drive for contentment is because this is what they needed to do in order to survive, yet the point still stands, what drives such animals to behave in the way that they do is the will to feel good.

However, unless you can show that it is possible to exist without having the will to exist, it is necessarily true that the reason why some animals have survived is because they have the will to feel good. The will to exist, is the same as the will to be affirmed, the will to be affirmed is the same as the will to feel good. On that note, it follows that the strongest drive in animal nature is the will to feel good (or the will for happiness), as this drive underlies all other drives in animal nature as without such a drive no other drives would be possible because without it, it would be impossible for the animal to exist.

 

[Not_Me]

Because the end to all human activity is acquisition of happiness, all actions should be judged in accordance to the consequences they produce. An action should be taken if and only if it conduces to our long term happiness.

The sole purpose of a system of ethics is to resolve issues when one person's desires conflict with that of another. The criteria you proposed does not appear to do this. Example:

Suppose I was able to skim 10% of your annual income undetected. Since it will increase my happiness, I would assert that it's the ethically correct action to take. On the other hand, if you were asked, you would judge the action to be unethical. If a third person was asked, she would say it's neutral.

 

[reason]

The sole purpose of a system of ethics is to resolve issues when one person's desires conflict with that of another. The criteria you proposed does not appear to do this.

Exactly.

The 'value-centered thinking' which SolitaryWalker considers so irrational is often an attempt at solving the problems which arise when everyone acts hedonistically. When each pursues their own well-being (happiness, contendedness, goals, or whatever) interests come into conflict. Ethical theories propose rules of conduct which resolve these conflicts such as, for example, property rights.