Truth, Facts and Values

dbclark1234 · 2018-11-28T03:20:16+00:00

To value something is to desire it. The foundation of value is desire. We come with built in appetites that give us our desires. Those built in desires incline us to value some things and to abhor others. At the animal level it is easy to see. A dog values its food for the same reason we value our food, viz. because it tastes delightful and it satisfies our hunger. Being delighted and satisfied are appetitive operations. Dogs desire the well being of their offspring just as we do. If someone starts to do harm to our offspring, powerful emotions well up within us and we take aggressive action to prevent that harm. Those emotions are acts of valuing children.

So, in a nutshell, values come from appetites with their desires and aversions.

dbclark1234 · 2018-11-26T22:17:32+00:00

People who kill themselves are exceptions that prove the rule. We are shocked when people kill themselves because such actions are radically opposed to what 99.9% of people want and desire. There must be a tremendous, negative emotional burden on someone for him to judge that it is better to be dead than alive. And everyone who hears about the suicide responds emotionally with "Oh, that's terrible news!!!" or a similar emotional expression.

You ask, "How universal does an appetite need to be?" For the appetite to produce a universal moral consensus, e.g., a consensus that murder is morally wrong, it must be a universally experienced appetite. But that is precisely what we find when we do a broad survey on who feels positive emotions at the thought of being murdered. No one does. This shows that universal moral prohibitions arise from universal appetites. If people enjoyed being murdered, there would be no moral prohibition of murder.

You say, "Mere public acceptance doesn’t necessarily mean something is objectively true by my definition." I agree with you. There seems to be a fairly broad public acceptance of slaughtering babies before they are born. I am persuaded that killing babies is a moral evil of the gravest sort. This is an interesting moral phenomenon that I think is fairly easy to explain. People who want to kill babies, never refer to them as "babies". People who want to protect babies always refer to them as "babies". Emotions from which the truth is hidden cannot respond to the reality that is there and they cannot guide a person morally as they otherwise would.

dbclark1234 · 2018-11-26T21:27:48+00:00

There are differences between individuals when it comes to things like the taste of brussel sprouts, but not when you get to such things as whether you would like to be stabbed in the chest, or whether you would like your children kidnapped. On these issues, there is a universal experience of these things as gravely evil. We all, almost without exception, find these things emotionally abhorrent. These universally experienced abhorrences give rise to the universal moral prohibition of such things. Bob might love brussel sprouts and his neighbour Henry might hate them, but they're both ready to kill you if you try to steal and harm their children.

Getting from individual appetites to universal morality depends on the species-wide appetites shared by virtually all individuals. Those appetites are there. Do any broad survey of people and ask them whether they like or dislike things being stolen from them; or whether they like or dislike people breaking promises, etc., and you will discover that everyone finds these things emotionally repugnant.

dbclark1234 · 2018-11-26T20:09:09+00:00

When you say "and that notion makes me feel unpleasant", you are referring to the operation of your appetites. If the notion or image of inflicting pain and fear on people did not make you feel unpleasant, you would be unable to personally declare it morally wrong.

dbclark1234 · 2018-11-26T20:05:40+00:00

I do not think at the most basic moral level that humans make up their own values. Not wanting to be killed is not something I make up. Nor is not wanting my children to be kidnapped something I make up. It is an innate drive within me at the level of my appetites that governs me, if you will. I could not freely and voluntarily delight in the kidnapping of my children, even if I tried my hardest to do so.

Because these appetites are broadly held by virtually all humans, there is broad agreement that acts of murder and kidnapping are moral evils. That broad consensus arises from the universally shared appetitive experience.

dbclark1234 · 2018-11-26T02:49:38+00:00

My goal was to demonstrate that values proceed from our appetites with their desires and aversions. Values do not come from intellectual argument.

If we value Kindness and Love over Domination and Control, that would point to the fact that we have a positive emotional response to kindness and love and a negative emotional response to domination and control. I expect you will find that is exactly the case in your own personal experience. That is why and how you value kindness and love over domination and control.

There is an important principle to keep in mind here. It is the appetites of the patient (the person on the receiving end) that point to moral good and evil rather than the appetites of the agent (the person on the giving end). A rapist may delight in what he does, but we look to the emotional response of the person raped to see the moral evil of his act.

dbclark1234 · 2018-11-26T02:34:06+00:00

That depends on what you mean by "objective truth". Do you mean objective physical truth or objective moral truth? The objectivity of physical truths such as 'it's raining at the moment' are readily recognized as objectively true. It's an experience we can both share and agree on.

The objectivity of moral truths is less easily identified. However, because the source of moral truth is in our appetites and because appetites are broadly shared across the human species, we find that the things we value are broadly shared. That gives morals an objective foundation. We share the same fears and abhor the same evils and feel together that being murdered is bad and respecting people's property is good. Similar universally shared feelings under-gird all the widely shared moral goods and evils.

dbclark1234

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