Ronnie de Sousa on why moral philosophy is shite- part 1

Ronnie de Sousa, whose supervisor was Benacerraff, writes in Aeon- 

I have come to regard the very idea of morality as fraudulent. 

One meaning of fraud is intentional deceit for gain. However, there must be some injury or unfairness involved. Something bad must have happened. Thus if I- your Agent- lie to you in such a manner that you make a very profitable deal from which I benefit, then though I may be guilty of some type of professional misconduct but am unlikely to be convicted of fraud. Thus, it seems the notion of fraud is inextricably bound up with morality. Now it may certainly be the case that everybody who takes up the idea of morality is a fraudster, but this does not mean that that the idea itself is fraudulent. 

Of course, Ronnie- as a philosopher may only engage with ideas, or appear to do so, as part of a Credentialist Ponzi scheme, but a fraudster who sees fraud in everything is merely a solipsist. He has trapped himself in his own ego. He has become his own God and there is nothing outside himself- so pervasive is his fraud. 

Morality, I now believe, is a shadow of religion,

The appeal of soteriological religion is that it makes ultimate felicity wholly independent of morality. Sinners get saved merely by Grace not Works. 

 serving to comfort those who no longer accept divine guidance but still hope for an ‘objective’ source of certainty about right and wrong. 

'Humanists' of various sorts have been around for centuries now. Some sought for a 'natural' religion binding people together in moral communities on the basis of human nature alone. Others sought to derive ethics from logic itself- e.g. a 'categorical' imperative. More recently, evolutionary game theory has tried to derive an objective morality from a single, supposed, instinct- e.g. a predilection for 'fairness' of a Rawlsian type.

But do any such ideas really 'comfort'? I don't see how. God wipes away my tears for my old neighbor because I can believe that she is cooking pasta for the angels and singing Neapolitan songs to them in her cracked voice. The fact is I know she had lived righteously and was looking forward to retiring to the villa in Italy her husband had purchased. True, the guy had been ensnared by a trollop but he'd keep ringing his wife and then putting down the phone overcome by shame and anguish. Sooner or later, he'd have begged his wife to join him. He'd made a mistake. Forgive and forget. Let our last decades be happy. 

I firmly believed that 'good' would triumph and the day would come when the priest would turn up and persuade Martha that her husband had repented. It was her duty to join him and keep him safe from trollops. The weaker vessel must have the softer heart. 

It didn't happen. Martha complained of a stomach ache. She went into hospital. A week later she was dead. What comfort can there be in knowing for certain that she was good? Only the knowledge that the good are rewarded.

Moralists claim to discern the existence of commands as inescapable as those of an omniscient and omnipotent God. 

But God's commands are escapable. You can tell him to fuck off and go proudly to Hell. A command which itself causes the action it requires is merely the running commentary on a deed. 

Those commands, moral philosophers teach, deserve to prevail over all other reasons to act – always, everywhere, and for all time. But that claim is bogus.

Or it is merely imperative. Ross's paradox describes situations where you say something illogical to intensify the imperative force of your assertion- e.g. 'Don't post the check to the insurance company. Just burn down the fucking house already!'. The meaning is 'don't forget to post the check, otherwise we will be un-insured against fire, flood, etc'. 

By ‘morality’, I refer to the sort of rules the transgression of which common sense decries as ‘immoral’, ‘wrong’ or ‘evil’. 

But these could be arbitrary shibboleths or 'costly signals' enabling a separating equilibrium which in turn can be seen as a 'discoordination game' permitting hedging and arbitrage on a 'pooling equilibrium' coordination game. 

Common sense can be dialethic or 'fuzzy logic' based or even 'ontologically dysphoric'- i.e. not at home in this world. All that matters is that it arise out of 'common knowledge'. 

Furthermore, actions perfectly in conformity with all conceivable rules may be wrong or evil. Indeed, one reason Theism provides comfort is because evil too is a mystery. It may burgeon despite even the most vigilant prevision. 

Such rules are generally regarded as obliging us without qualification. 

The big reason philosophy declined continually in prestige over the last 50 years is because pedants started asserting that all sorts of crazy shit was 'generally regarded' as true. In this particular case, there is an implicit qualification stipulating for the sort of person who might reason in a particular way and hold certain values.

 More abstractly, we may say, in the language of category theory, that we are assuming a 'most efficient' construction such that a  'universal property' is satisfied.  Wikipedia says- Universal properties come in two types: initial properties and terminal properties. Since these are dual notions, it is only necessary to discuss one of them.

The idea of using an initial property is to set up the problem in terms of some auxiliary category E, so that the problem at hand corresponds to finding an initial object of E. This has an advantage that the optimization—the sense that the process finds the most efficient solution—means something rigorous and is recognisable, rather like the attainment of a supremum. The category E is also formulaic in this construction, since it is always the category of elements of the functor to which one is constructing an adjoint.

A rule which obliges an action without qualification must point to at least one object with this initial property. However, by duality, this means there is at least one rights holder to whom obligations are discharged without qualification. Clearly this is easier done as a book-keeping exercise or as part of a calculus, rather than something real one could point to. This involves a pruning back of the semantic value of 'universal property' signifiers by pragmatic considerations which ultimately boil down to questions of efficiency and solving actual problems- not shitting higher than your arsehole incessantly.

 To summarize- a 'Tarskian primitive' can be wholly undefined but not every term in a discourse can be 'primitive'. Consider the word 'debit'. It is inextricably linked to 'credit'. It can't be a stand alone Tarskian primitive. It may be described as an 'adjoint functor'. These, in maths, are useful because they relate to finding the most efficient solution to a given problem in a formulaic manner. In other words, these aren't pure semantic objects. They are 'operators' on a Hilbert space or its Gentzenian equivalent.

This is easy to understand. How can there be an obligation without a corresponding rights-holder? The notion of an obligation without any qualification is empty. It is like saying- 'Cats are generally regarded to be dogs- because only dogs are man's best friend and yet we see lots of people doting on their cats.' 

They prescribe duties not in virtue of your goals or role – such as ‘the duties of the secretary includes taking minutes of the meeting’ – but without qualification. They are claimed to ‘bind’ us merely in virtue of our status as human beings. 

That's a big qualification! The 'conatus' of continuing to be a human being involves not doing all sorts of stupid shit however 'moral' they may be deemed. 

And philosophers have constructed a vast industry devoted to the elaboration of subtle theories designed to justify them. Against morality thus conceived, I have five complaints.

Only one complaint is effective- viz. these guys are stupid and write like shit and don't know shit about that which they write about. Moral philosophy could 'pay for itself' without having to participate in a Credentialist Ponzi scheme. It could recruit smart peeps wot rite gud. Then stupid auto-didacts like me would pay good money for a product which 'alters our ethos' in a useful manner and thus is ethical, rather than pretending to be about ethics for some crap careerist reason.

First, most systems of morality are inherently totalising. Adhering to them consistently is impossible, and so each system is forced into incoherence by setting arbitrary limits to its own scope.

So what? Using a particular mathematical system- e.g. ZFC- does not require us to believe or be bound by its 'totalizing' implications. Methodenstreit we will always have with us. A pragmatic sort of instrumentalism is useful and productive. The author would know Benaceraffs identification problem very well.  The pity of it, is that Moral Philosophy treated as 'open', problems which Maths had either closed or 'depassed' by reason of results relating to Concurrency, Complexity, Computability etc. during the Seventies and Eighties. No doubt, 'Decision theory's' refusal to embrace Knightian Uncertainty, Hanann consistency, Muth Rationality, Machine learning etc, etc, played a part as did a Sen-tentious type of Welfare Econ which I have critiqued elsewhere.

Still, the fact is, moral philosophy became the marriage of ignorant sophistry and virtue signaling axiologies of an adolescent type.  Simply by replacing Hilbert type calculi with Gentzen 'sequent calculi' all its vaunted dilemmas and aporias disappear.

 Second, our preoccupation with morality distorts the force of our reasons to act, by effecting among them a triage that results in some reasons being counted twice over.

'Double-counting' arises wherever amalgamation problems subsist. Getting rid of it is easy if sequent calculi are distinguishable or, equivalently, the thing has a graph theoretic model. Even otherwise, if there is a robust Structural Causal Model then 'forking' can be imposed such that double counting is avoided. This aint rocket science. It is Accountancy 101. Double entry book-keeping itself defeats double counting.  

 Third, the intellectual acrobatics invoked to justify this double counting commit us to insoluble and therefore idle theoretical debates.

Only if really stupid people are doing the debating. The problem with moral philosophy is that it has been adversely selective- i.e. it attracts cretins who then become Professors who have to cater to sociopathic Grievance Studies type nutters. 

 Fourth, the psychological power of moral authority can promote deplorable systems of evaluation as easily as good ones.

Thankfully, pedants have no 'moral authority'. Anyway, they will soon be revealed to have groped their students or tweeted something homophobic or be discovered to have voted Republican.

 And fifth, the emotions cultivated by a preoccupation with morality encourage self-righteousness and masochistic guilt.

Virtue signaling of any sort has this effect.

When making choices, I suggest, we should consider our reasons without asking what is ‘morally right’.

No. When making choices we should look over our shoulder and see what the smart peeps are doing. Tardean mimetics is the way to go. If the smartest people find it worthwhile to speak of things as 'morally right', then this will trickle down. It must be the case that there is some reputational or procedural benefit in so doing. Otherwise, smart peeps would be going 'this is morally neutral or inconsequential. It really doesn't matter which end of your hard boiled egg you crack open.'

 This might seem preposterous. Let me explain.

Note that the word ‘ought’ and its relatives (‘must’, ‘should’, etc) are used in four different ways. 

Nonsense! They can be used in umpteen different ways. Moral philosophers, by reason of their great stupidity, think they can taxonomize natural language semantics- carve it up according its joints, so to speak. But natural language is a co-evolved process on an uncertain fitness landscape. It tames complexity faster than the thing can burgeon. Thus, the thing can't be done. If it could, 'Keisler order' wouldn't have infinitely many classes, and moral philosophy mightn't be a waste of time (unless it is done by smart peeps wot can rite gud- in which case it would be litterachur of an improving type for gormless folk like wot I iz.)

Only one is ‘moral’. There is an ‘ought’ of prediction, as in ‘According to the forecast, it ought to rain tomorrow.’ 

No. That's just bad English. 'According to the forecast, it might rain tomorrow' is exactly the right thing to say.  You ought not to pretend that forecasts aint stochastic. 

A second ‘ought’ is of prudence or practical deliberation: ‘You ought to try an electric toothbrush’; 

The above is bad English. What the Queen, Gor Bless 'Er, says is- 'Dude! Try a fucking electric toothbrush on something other than your twat! You'd have less plaque and halitosis and shit'. Take it from me. I'm totes British and live within walking distance of Bucking Palace. 

‘I should see a doctor about that lump in my breast.’ 

Is okay. Morality does require you to preserve your 'conatus'. 

The third refers to legal obligation: ‘By law, I must file my tax returns this week.’ 

This too is okay for the same reason.

These are different uses, but they pose no obvious problems of interpretation. The fourth, the ‘moral ought’, is another matter. That’s the one that claims overriding authority for general rules such as ‘You ought to keep your promises’ or ‘You must not hurt innocent people.’

But the thing is still defeasible because 'promises' and 'innocence' and 'hurt' are Tarskian primitives. The proposition is not well defined. It has no juristic force independent of determinations of fact. 

In reality, imperative statements- be they what they may- have no conceptual tie to action absent some protocol bound, buck-stopped, decision procedure regarding alethic matters. Of course, in so far as imperatives are related to existential issues, they can be subsumed under the rubric of 'conatus' and 'synderesis' etc.  This is the common sense notion that morality requires you to be healthy and prosperous and secure etc, etc, because if you aint then you are no fucking use to man nor beast. 

Some imperative statements of an 'unnatural' kind- if made by smart or good peeps- have an aesthetic or emotional valency such that we find them useful. But that is a separate matter and has to do with mimesis- which was the true 'first philosophy' and the high road to ethical religion, politics and oikos based ecumenicism and irenicism and telling pseudo-categorical akrebia to go fuck itself as well as the donkey of a pedant which it rode in on.

The moral is uneasily related to both prudence and law. 

No. Prudence, or regret minimization, acknowledges an ontologically dysphoric 'moral' realm. The Law  acknowledges the justiciability of 'moral clauses' in contracts and has developed a culpa levis in abstracto doctrine with respect to torts and Trusts and so forth. The relationship of morality to prudence and law is easily understood. 

Moral duties are apt to conflict with self-interest; and legality is neither sufficient nor necessary for morality. 

However, there is always a way to make morality justiciable. The mistake is to think it can, without getting out of its arm chair, reduplicate a protocol bound juristic process which is buck-stopped so as to be useful. The latter is a co-evolved process. The former is a case of going potty in the chair provided by a University. 

Morality is sometimes invoked in favour of a proposed law or against an unjust one; but it is widely agreed that in a modern pluralistic society the law should not enforce every moral norm.

The law is costly to enforce. This is a matter of 'economia'.

Lying is widely regarded as immoral, yet only under oath is it illegal. Modern law has also increasingly withdrawn from some ‘private’ domains. Sex and religion are obvious examples. Most now agree with what Pierre Trudeau said in 1967, when he was Canada’s justice minister, that ‘there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation’.

Canada is welcome into my bed-room any time. The elder sister of the Commonwealth will probably be very grateful and cook me a nice breakfast with lots of Canadian bacon and...urm...maple syrup? Fuck. That sounds disgusting. 


In short, many things are neither legally compulsory nor forbidden. But morality is not so restrained: a system of morality can, like God, claim total authority over every action and even every thought. Such a totalising system would seem oppressively intrusive. Yet the leading theories of morality can mitigate their overreach only by setting arbitrary limits to their own relevance.

No. It is sufficient to accept a 'univalent foundations' approach like that of Voevodsky in Maths. If I personally got paid to shit higher than my arsehole as a 'Moral Philosopher', I would interpret Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as nothing more than what he claimed, (but with better math)- viz the 'Muth Rational' solution to a particular type of Coordination game such that the 'Transition Matrix' has the same property. In other words, this is something, 'common knowledge' based 'common sense', would lead us all- by 'spontaneous order'- to implement in a manner univocal with the desired result- e.g making this party fun by means which are also fun. 

This shit aint hard to understand & thanks to the internet, it is easy to give a 'quick and dirty' mathematical representation to something which is immediately superior to that of any toiler in this Vineyard of Vinegar. This is literally a case of 'the last' being 'first'. 

You can now make a better of fist of this sort of shit over a half bottle of Bacardi and access to a smartphone than even Hilary Putnam or David Lewis could have done forty years ago (to be clear, both shat the bed in their final years) . The Math has moved on as has access to it- which is not to say that it can actually illumine shit- save for those for whom it is a mimetic target. 

In this respect among many others, morality seems like the ghost of religion. Religion is totalising by its very nature: God knows and judges everything you do and think. 

Ronnie, baby!, become a Hindu and say 'Aham Brahmasmi' , or a Sufi, and say 'Anal Haq' or just quote Christ- 'ye are as Gods' and, like Picard says on Star Trek, 'make it so'. 

The truth is, as Foucault proved, it is Neo-Liberalism which watches you poop. God is the guy who forgives and takes in the pederasts and serial killers and Pol Pot type nutters. The Eschaton is like totes cool with Charlie Manson. Those who serve the Son of Man are brought into a mysterious economy of order which the Church terms 'Katechon' and stupid nig-nog wogs like wot I iz term 'Krishna'. 

And terror, though less fashionable among Christians nowadays, is a tried-and-true instrument of faith. Many Christians have lived in terror of hell. ‘Divine justice never stands in the way,’ proclaimed the 18th-century revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards. ‘Yea, on the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment.’

Yup. That's the sort of revenge porn dudes in Colonial times stroked themselves off to. I suspect the thing has to do with constipation- which Luther certainly suffered from. Suddenly, anal intrusion- of a suitably Satanic sort- didn't sound so bad. This is not a matter on which I can speak with any authority. Being a cow worshipping vegetarian means you tend to shit like a cow. 

And it works: the threat of hell (though not the promise of heaven) turns out to be a good motivator.

Fuck off! Getting rich is a great motivator more especially if you can claim this is an 'outward and visible' sign of inner 'election'. Equally, making the poor feel terribly ashamed of themselves, motivates them to move somewhere else or else work themselves to death in manic protestation at their own humiliation and abandonment. 

 Without God, however, the moral terrorism that relies on hell loses some leverage. And anyway, most moralists are reluctant to equate morality with fear of punishment. Still, morality hardly retreats. The most commonly defended systems of morality, when taken to their logical conclusion, extend their tentacles to every choice. Just as venial sins can be forgiven, so in practice some acts are exempt from moral scrutiny. But that is only in virtue of ad hoc intellectual acrobatics with which moral systems insulate themselves from their more repugnant implications.

No. Moral systems are heteronomous and thrive on notions of pollution and disgust. They can be justified by 'pathogen avoidance theory' or other such prudential considerations. However, ethical theories have to perform all sorts of intellectual acrobatics so as to prove compatible with ad captum vulgi moral truth.  Nietzsche says,  Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the whole world, that the whole world was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people
This is the killing joke which animates 'moral philosophy'. 


This can be illustrated for all three of the most prominent systems of moral theory: Kantianism, utilitarianism, and virtue theory inspired by Aristotle. Each, if taken strictly, entails that everything comes under morality’s purview. Here’s a sketch of how they do so, and of how each tries to walk some of it back.

'Taken strictly' means 'taken as a fucking joke'. But anything at all can be subjected to such ridicule. Socioproctology restricts itself to pointing the finger at assholes, not dudes doing useful stuff. 


In Kantian morality, a ‘categorical imperative’ is supposed to follow from the simple fact that I am a rational being. 

But, Kant explicitly founds his method on that of the law courts. He knew, being of Pietist stock, that this was a 'second best' solution- indeed, Socrates says it is like using the oars when there is no wind to fill the sails- and, his ancestors would have certainly endorsed the Rabbinical use of the word 'kategoros' as meaning Satanic- i.e. the Devil as accuser. 

Anyway, one could always see Hegel as repairing Kant so that what you have is a 'spread' of Brouwerian 'choice sequences' such that each seeks to be the 'Subject' of the other and so you get a 'Muth Rational' (i.e. reflexive equilibrium) solution which we term 'Spiritual' in that things which are material and scarce become 'non-rival' and thus spark endogenous growth. Recall that Kant and the beametenliberalismus Germanic pedagogic class were playing at 'catch up growth' w.r.t to Adam Smith's Scotland which was itself seeking to catch up with England. 

A recent result of Terence Tao re. the Collatz conjecture shows why looking at 'almost all' cases enables you, like a magician, to determine useful outcomes in advance. Essentially, there is always a robust 'reflection principle' which in turn means a Gibbard type 'revelation principle' is accessible for any coordination game or mechanism design involving a univocal Transition Matrix. In plain words, the Maths shows that Natural language- precisely because it is co-evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape- makes that which psilosophers think is hard, actually as easy as pie. Indeed, we now know why Maths itself must hold this to be so. Plato's project is complete. Sadly, its main utility was to assert that buggering wealthy young boys was inferior to letting them learn maths. This is not now generally considered to be a particularly relevant or useful result. The Ancient Greeks may have had their reasons for valorizing pederasty but we have better reasons for sending child molesters to the type of jails where they get to mount each other to their heart's content. 

Similar to how you can just see, as a rational being, that 2 + 2 = 4, you are expected to just see that an act is wrong unless you could coherently envisage a world in which everyone does it. 

That is easily done. Kant, as repaired by Hegel, and then Hegel as repaired by Brouwer, and Brouwer as repaired by Martin Lof and Martin Lof as repaired by whoever the fuck... I don't actually know any fucking Math... like you hadn't already guessed. Anyway, my point is, young people can easily prove that for any given 'Spiritual' task- e.g. getting the kids to fix the fucking planet already without worrying about who got tenure or was awarded the Nobel- there is a Muth rational- i.e. common knowledge (plus Aumann signal based) Transition Matrix or 'golden path' which is univocal and robust etc, etc.

Ronnie is way brighter than me. He could put this so much better. The guy is now Canadian. Since the time of Stephen Leacock, the Canadian academic has shown wit and catholicity of interest and empathy and a lapidary mastery of the English language all the more laudable because they are all either Mounties or Moose.

This provides a test for every thought and deed. It not only applies when my actions affect others: Kantian morality explicitly burdens me with duties to myself. 

Listen, Ronnie, you big moose, Kant explicitly released you from the burden of having to jerk off which coz you got great big hooves was totes considerate of him. 

This is another manifestation of morality’s status as the ghost of religion. If God owns me, it is not absurd to suppose that God alone can dispose of me. 

Yes, but God may be like an employer who can't be bothered to fire an incompetent or lazy bungler. Speaking generally, a tort by an employee is now considered a case of negligent hiring, supervision, retention or training. Suppose, you work for a fast food outlet and have got into the habit of not washing your hands after taking a dump. You know you won't be fired even if customers get diarrhea because supervision is lax and Head Office just doesn't give a damn. Still, you may be persuaded that washing your hands is the right thing to do. Not to do so is immoral. Similarly, though feeling yourself one of the 'elect', you might still think it moral not to be an utter asshole to the unwed mom or whatever even though you are assured of Heaven while she and her little bastard are certainly damned. 

But in secular terms this makes no sense. Sure, I might sometimes say I promised myself … But a promise can always be waived by its beneficiary. 

No. It can only be waived if there is competency,  adequate consideration or some instrument available of superior enforceability. 

As the promisee, I can waive my own promise. 

This is a justiciable matter. Another party may have locus standi if they relied on your promise to yourself.

To say I failed to keep it is just to say I changed my mind.

No. It is to say that, from the legal point of view, there was no promise and thus no waiver. But a Court may disagree. It may decide you have lost competency to make any waiver. Alternatively, some other party may be able to get you to either fulfil the promise or compensate them for having incurred loss by relying upon it.  

 Kantians recognise that some duties are ‘imperfect’: you could always give more to charity, but we shan’t blame you if you do the minimum. 

Actually, you could always ban any type of charity as being a violation of the categorical imperative. People are getting to feel good about themselves by using the destitute as a means to an end. To treat them as an end in themselves, you should be raising their productivity so they can stand on their own feet. 'Workfare' not 'Welfare' is Kantian. 

But placing that minimum is arbitrary. Some Kantians, though not Kant himself, might even grant that sometimes I really need to lie – to the murderer, for example, who asks me to reveal their victim’s whereabouts. 

You don't really need to lie. You could restrain the murderer. Superman always tells the truth. 

But those concessions, however sensible, are not part of the Kantian system: on the contrary, any derogation to the categorical imperative is strictly inconsistent with it.

Kant ended up babbling about Zarathustra. So what if he made mistakes? So did Newton and Einstein and so forth. It is clear that a merely categorical imperative can't be 'universalizable' because we have no set of categories which can divide up Reality according to its joints. Just as the fact that 'crucial experiments' refuted Kant's arguments for 'a priori synthetic' judgments with respect to Absolute Space and Time and incongruent counterparts and so forth, so too with his categorical imperative. But that's cool coz we now know so much more about 'categories'. 

There's nothing stopping a moral philosopher coming up with a categorical theory with 'univalent foundations' which sheds new light on 'wedge issues' and 'hard cases'. This may 'alter our ethos' if done sufficiently well. We are plastic that way. 

Does utilitarianism fare any better? The principle of utility sets the happiness of the greatest number as the ultimate value.

Yet, Jeremy Bentham didn't spend his time giving beejays to homeless dudes. Gladstone did, but that's a different story. 

 Nothing in the logic of that principle can exempt any act or thought from being fed into the calculation of overall utility. 

Sure it can. Bentham himself wanted to rule out stuff which was mere sensation producing. If we had a way to 'carve up reality along its joints'- more particularly if we could stipulate what was objectively beneficial or harmful to any given agent, then Utilitarianism would be a science of happiness and longevity prescribing and procuring things in minute detail for each member of society.

Again, in practice, utilitarians will make exceptions. A racist’s distress, however genuine, at an African American’s success can simply be discounted, perhaps by appealing to a concept of ‘rights’, justified in some ingenious way by reference to utility. 

One could simply rule out 'nosey preferences'.

Moral claims, as always, outrank prudence – the rational consideration of one’s own interests – but most utilitarians want to keep an area of personal freedom relating only to the latter: whether to play hockey or chess is not a moral question.

Again, this is no big scandal or stumbling block. Utility can be conceived in 'regret minimizing terms' once the fitness landscape is accorded appropriate properties of uncertainty and indeterminacy. 

Essentially, any bunch of shibboleths- those of Mussar Judaism or modern Jainism or whatever- can have a representation as a deontic logic with 'univalent foundations'.  Defeasibility can always be moved down an extensional fork.

Perhaps, given our fallible nature, inconsistency in a moral system is a defect we must live with

Or live without coz who gives a fuck?

It is not clear, however, that utilitarianism can consistently insulate such questions from its own reach.

This type of pedantic shite is constantly finding things 'not clear' when it is fucking obvious that shite is shite. Either utilitarianism has a representation as a sequent calculus or it doesn't. If it does, it can insulate itself from anything it likes because the tautologies it invokes are conditional. If utilitarianism has no such representation then it is 'anything goes' and 'global' indeterminacy means we can't say it hasn't insulated itself from any shite whatsoever. 

 For since my happiness is a component of the total, any harm I do to myself will affect the world’s net utility.  

Nonsense! Us guys will be laughing ourselves silly over your self-inflicted harm.

If hockey can harm me, my choosing to play it should be, strictly speaking, immoral. 

Though we only pay to watch that sport coz we want to see peeps spitting out their own teeth.

Not even the trivial can be kept apart in principle from the morally significant. As Peter Singer has stressed, for the price of another pair of shoes, you might have saved some child from starvation. 

For the price of listening to Singer, rather than cooking and eating him, you might have saved everybody from stupidity. 

For a consistent utilitarian, you are guilty whenever you contribute much less to charity than what would entail your own destitution.

The true scandal is that Jeremy Bentham didn't go around giving beejays to homeless dudes the way Queen Victoria did. 

 Since most people find this to be more than they can accept, Singer has provided a calculator that will suggest how much you should set aside to save others from poverty. 

The cretin doesn't get that his University Department should be defunded according to any decent 'calculator'.

But that again sets an arbitrary limit to the principle of utility.

No. No fucking principle is involved. This is just naked stupidity.

For an Aristotelian or ‘virtue theorist’, the case can look somewhat better.

Not if there is a 'slingshot' type situation such that there is only one true fact which is not decomposable. Yet, if anything is true, there must be such a fact- at least at the 'end of time'.

 A virtue theorist can admit a plurality of values. 

or, indeed, a plurality of selves.

The ideally virtuous person I could (but fail to) be differs from the virtuous person you could be. 

But both these ideal persons may be fucking in a really gross manner- if only in some ideal sense.

Even here, however, the totalising tendency can be made out. For whether there is a single model for all or a different one for each, you might not be actualising your own potential for human excellence as efficiently as you should. 

You definitely aint, if you lend credence to that crap. Antidosis is the way to go- i.e. swap places with the  cunt lecturing you and lecture him instead. Moral Philosophy is so obviously the predestined pharmakon/pharmakos worthy of being turned over to the Grievance Studies zombies. At any rate, that's how come Alexander's tutor ended up anchoring a more Catholic Pantocrator's theological paideia. Till Vatican Two which too, for English Catholics, was that kiss of death which kept its Lazarus identity alive. 

Aristotle himself avoids having to say that every act and thought is subject to moral praise or censure mainly by conceding, in the opening chapter of his Nicomachean Ethics, that ‘exactness must not be looked for in all discussions alike’. 

This is the fault of akrebia. Economia is the way to go. Philosophy must pay for itself one way or another.

The morality-free space I can carve for myself is mainly due to the impossibility of knowing exactly what my potential might be.

Excellent! Way to bury the lead, Ron! 

It's lines like that which explain why it can be worthwhile for smart peeps to teach shite.


In the end, then, in each moral system, some space is typically protected from the tyranny of totalising morality only by making arbitrary concessions about realms of life that are deemed insufficiently important to need controlling. The price paid is inconsistency.

This is false. Any axiological system will exhibit robustness to 'immaterial' perturbations. That's the first thing you learn when you train in Accountancy. Emotive talk of 'protection' from some meta-metaphorical 'tyranny' is unworthy of the guy who wrote the previous sentence. 


Perhaps, given our fallible nature, inconsistency in a moral system is a defect we must live with. But that would still leave the institution of morality open to my second charge: the double counting of some reasons.

Poor fellow, he is repeating himself. It's only funny when I do it coz I'm drunk not senile. 


Reasons to act come in a host of different kinds. 

No they don't. Either you are an 'Agent' (as opposed to a Principal) in which case your 'reason to act' has been prespecified, or you have a Hohfeldian immunity with respect to a particular action. If you are foolish enough to provide a 'reason to act' with respect to this immunity, then you are waiving it for no good reason. Of course, as a matter of 'mere puffery' you are welcome to pretend that you only ate up all the chocolate eclairs you bought so as to protest Neo-Liberalism or to affirm solidarity with bisexual Guatemalan goats or whatever. 

They can be driven by whims or by long-term concerns; they can relate to my welfare or to that of others; and they can pertain to any domain, from the aesthetic to the financial. Some take the form of rules claiming a special status in virtue of being moral reasons, which automatically outweigh other types of reasons.

Like Mahatma Gandhi who considered it immoral to permit the Brits to rule India. But he changed his mind when he contemplated the alternative and went meekly off to jail in 1922. His argument was that it was both immoral to accept British Rule as well as immoral to do anything which might make it collapse. Obviously, it would be immoral of the Brits not to lock him up till he had cooled down and decided to dedicate himself to something yet more pointless and stupid.

 As we saw, morality can arbitrarily decide to ignore some of your reasons, such as your preference for one flavour of ice-cream or the colour to paint your door. But when a reason does wear the special badge of morality, then, most philosophers insist, it is ‘definitive, final, over-riding, or supremely authoritative’, in the words of William K Frankena in 1966, and ‘inescapable’, as Bernard Williams put it in 1986. What could justify such a status?

Stupidity.

This is stupid shit. I have shown why- in all contexts- it is irrational to have 'reasons to act' save for consideration under a contract. When the police ask 'what was your reason to be in x at time y?' always say, 'I want my lawyer'. Reasons speak to intentions. Consider Regina v Shivpuri. If Shivpuri had kept mum he couldn't have been convicted. That cretin- studying law at SOAS- thought 'impossible attempt' applied. Sadly, the Judges decided to listen to some shite Utilitarian philosopher and took 'reason to act' as 'intention' which established 'mens rea'. Shivpuri was silly but innocent. Judges changed the law coz they thought the bloke was smart. He was Jim Garrison's co-author - i.e. as stupid as shit. 

A crucial feature of moral reasons is that they are always

strategic, not alethic.

based (or ‘supervenient’) on other, ordinary facts that can be specified without reference to morality.

This stupidity has gone on too long. It is easily refuted. Morality is 'multiply realizable'. The same course of action is compatible with all sorts of different common knowledge information sets. The thing is 'anything goes'. 

 Suppose for example that you are considering doing X. You notice that doing X will cause someone pain. That might strike you as a reason not to do X. Call that reason A. Another fact might also strike you as a reason against X: that it will be boring, perhaps, or too expensive. Call that reason B. Moralists will tell you that your reason A, but not your reason B, also ‘grounds’ another reason not to do X, namely that it would be immoral. And on that basis, reason A but not reason B now gets to be ‘inescapable’, ‘overriding’ any reason you had in favour of X: that it would be exciting, say, or memorable. So now it seems that reason A, unlike reason B, gives you two reasons not to do X: reason A (that it will cause pain), plus the fact that X is immoral. But since this second reason was just grounded on reason A, what can it possibly add to it? How can it suddenly make reason A override all other reasons? It seems to be just a way of counting it twice.

Why is this fucked in the head? It's because 'noticing' is promiscuous rather than purposeful. This means the information set is being updated (by 'notices') in a manner which invalidates the assumption that the sequent calculus being deployed has any deontic component. The 'Moralist' who tells you stuff, aint part of your sequent calculus nor is stuff you 'noticed' part of his.  True, you could abandon your own 'sequent calculus' and just glom on to that of the Moralist's. But that has nothing to do with 'grounds'.  It has to do with mimesis or cognitive dissonance. 

Double counting is solved by looking at 'value added'. What if values are incommensurable? Then there is a change in an inventory matrix which can be evaluated in different contexts on the basis of 'shadow prices'. There really is no big problem here.


Unless, of course, some actual added value is conferred by the label despite its being grounded entirely on the original reason. And that is just what the moralist claims. Your original reason just consisted in the fact that X would cause pain in a particular person. But the morality of that reason is now said to derive from something else: namely, the fact that there is a general moral rule that says you shouldn’t ever cause anybody pain. The reason you have been given by the moralist is indeed another reason, because it is not just about this case but about everyone, always and everywhere.

So this is simply a 'certificate' or other such signaling or screening device. Where value is added some such process to increase inventory fungibility can pay for itself. 

It is not the case that you get twice the kudos for knowing Accountancy and qualifying as a CPA. Some value is added but it really is up to you to take advantage of this new 'signal' .


Unfortunately, the quest for moral foundations makes things only worse

Coz quests for a toilet where no toilet is can worsen the underlying problem. Just fucking squat down on the path to Truth's pathless land and squeeze out a turd already.

Notice, however, that this general rule, if indeed it is different from the reason you had in the first place (not to hurt this person) is brought in to justify it. 

We don't know that. General rules may have been brought in for wholly different reasons. Some kids may think that the only reason 'general reasons' are brought in is so as to spoil their fun. But those kids are sociopaths. You genuinely don't want them using your nut-sack as a football. 

The claim now is that it’s wrong to hurt this person because that would be an instance of a general moral truth: it’s always wrong to hurt anyone (unless it’s deserved, or a means to some good, etc – we can take an ‘other things being equal’ clause as given). But it is a fact of logic that a general statement can never be more probable (hence more credible) than a single instance. 

It is also a fact of logic that conditional tautologies- which is what give rise to Gentzen type sequent calculi- suffer no such infirmity. Another way of saying this is that Reason is Bayesian not bullshit simply.

The general statement entails the particular, but not conversely. 

Only for Hilbert style calculi. Kant and Hegel and so on could be seen as committing to a constructivist program which, speaking equitably, is feasible enough. William Lawvere has given a category theory based account of Hegelianism which stresses 'adjointness'. However, his objection to the invocation of the Wartime Measures Act, if valid, would militate for the conclusion that Canadians have no souls. Since this is undeniable, it follows that there is a canonical mathematical representation of Moral Philosophy which has univalent foundations. The manic protestation against this fact by the Canadian Moose or Mountie (into one of which category, Ronnie must fall) is wholly ineffectual. Like the Golem, Canadians may be able to see spiritual entities- which explains why Lawvere may be right, despite being Canadian- whereas even a tzadig can not do so, save by special authorization. However, the thing isn't really human- though in a rough hewn manner it may appear so- like Canadians.  

If your original reason is challenged, surely you would want to support it with something more credible than it was in the first place. 

Which is why you don't offer a 'sound' reason save for consideration. Otherwise, if under the grip of an autocrat, give Good Soldier Shweik type reasons. Baffle the bureaucrats with stupid, stinky, bullshit. They will decide it isn't worth their time to 'reform' or 're-educate' you. Obviously, there is a danger in going down this road. Nehru & Co continued to be Shweik type Gandhian shitheads- preventing India from feeding or defending itself- after the country had become Independent. Their rationale was that if India became a sufficiently shitty shit-hole then nobody would want to conquer it again. Then the Chinese attacked. Colin Clark, who well knew the shittiness of the Indian mathematical economist- or moral philosopher, come to that- assumed that Mao only fucked up coz he'd had Indian advisors!

Instead, the moral philosopher tells you that your reason has become overriding, because it is derivable from another reason less credible than itself. It seems that your confidence in your original reason should be diminished rather than raised by that ‘justification’. Why bring in the dubious to buttress the obvious?

Why get a Credential or Professional certification or invite 'Client Satisfaction' scores? Everybody has a different 'sequent calculus'. There is an arbitrage opportunity even absent information asymmetry. It is enough if uncorrelated asymmetries exist and are common knowledge for it to be eusocial to invest in 'signals' relating to 'bourgeois strategies'. 

This is where the moral theorists really get going. They recognise that a justification is just another reason, which can in turn be challenged, and so on. To stop the ‘and so on’ from going ad infinitum, they appeal to ultimate values or principles that serve as foundations from which both the original reason and the general rule can be deduced. 

The Golem, like the Canadian, can fulfil a moral purpose. But, lacking a soul, it can't itself be righteous. Of course, if it the thing is imaginary or radically uncertain- i.e. unknowable- then soullessness can't be predicated of it- or even Canadians, for that matter. Thus, the best move of the Philosophical Moose or Mounty would be to embrace the infinite regress in which the God looks upon his Rabbi in Prague as the Rabbi looks upon his Golem.

If those foundations are absolutely certain, they will transmit that certainty to the particular reasons they entail.

Okay. You win. Ronnie, mate, you have wasted your life in a shite profession. Philosophy is the Golem which engendered this Canadian who sees Morality as the shadow of Religion, but not Religion as the shadow of God. Sad.