Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
You seem to have sidestepped my question, which was not “are morals relative,” or even, “why do you believe in moral absolutes.”
It was rather, how do individuals and groups determine morals? This is also not a question about politics, but rather procedural. I don’t think your answer would be “long tradition,” but I guess it could be. That runs counter to your confession if individual rights, however, as many groups across the world, often in the minority, have lengthy traditions different from Europe’s.
For example, certain Buddhist traditions would, in fact, hold that allowing torture of oneself is a moral imperative.
FWIW, I certainly don’t feel like I am losing a debate, or even having one. I’m simply asking clarifying questions about assertions of yours that seem presumptive. I do appreciate your engagement.
I will push back on one thing though. If the basis of your belief in “moral realism” is simply long tradition, I don’t see how thousands of years is sufficient. Humanity has been around for much longer. And I can’t think of any moral that is universal and also divorced from economics. Perhaps you can provide an example? Maybe involuntary euthanasia of old people? Not sure that goes back much before the Hebrews in the western tradition, nor has it ever been universal.
Another way to ask my question might be, what is the standard against which you measure moral truth, and where does it come from?
I answered this quite directly, actually:
I am a contractualist, so there is greater detail on what I think the process actually looks like (and some standard objections to my view) behind that link.
It's not. The basis of my belief in moral realism is reason and experience. Specifically, I find moral relativism to be self-undermining; I also don't know anyone who practices applied relativism in a persuasively principled way.
I explicitly said
so I don't understand what your question (or economics) has to do with anything.
As with every other category of truth you value, the answer to both questions is "human reason."
So I read your linked encyclopedia entries. I'm not sure the author of the moral realism entry would agree that "human reason" is equivalent to moral truth, or that it can exist in any objectively ideal form. Based on these entries alone, it would seem that relativism and realism are not directly antithetical. Rather, realism might be a subset of objectivism, the true antithesis of relativism. But I'm not into binary synthesis, so that probably doesn't matter much.
However, it seems from the articles, your agreement that no moral universal exists places you in one of the modified relativist camps. These seem to take a realist approach but only within particular contexts, such as a society; in your case, broad humankind.
I'm still unclear on two things. One question I didn't see answered in your linked entry is why anyone should care whether none of their peers could reasonably reject any particular proposition? What about Rick Sanchez? His skills are infinite, enabling him to act in any direction he wills. Every choice is executed in a perfectly well-reasoned way, what logical basis could persuade him to engage in any contract with anyone?
The question remains, too, what is the procedure by which human reason may be made manifest? What basis is there for the presumption that every human has the same concept of "reasonably?" If no such presumption is in play, how can a contract form without a common framework? As a practical matter, noone's conception will be identical, and some will vary a lot. What basis exists to coerce one to accept another's conception? Whose conception should be the one enforced?
Because we have good reason to coexist with others; it's in our interest to have friends, family, and the like. Obviously Rick Sanchez is at least superhuman (and, correspondingly, fictional). Essentially no one can live without other people, and almost no one really wants to; even those who give it a serious go can never transcend the fact that their present independence requires substantial past dependence (on caregivers as a child, on a linguistic community, on a pre-existing economy, etc.).
Actually this is substantially what drives people's interest in Rick Sanchez as a character--he does not embody independence so much as he embodies ambivalence about his independence. He doesn't strictly need other people, but indulging this fact dehumanizes him, which he's not entirely on board with. If he wasn't constantly dragging Morty around, helping his family even though he totally doesn't care about them, etc. the show would be... well, not necessarily boring, but at best kind of power pornography. Imagine a Just Rick show in which he transcended all connection to everyone--his family, alt-Ricks, gods, whatever. He never has to justify himself to anyone else, he never shares his joy or pain with anyone else, he just goes places and does things without regard for what anyone thinks (good or bad!). Without the desire to justify his actions to others, he would become totally unrelatable as a character.
Instead, we have Rock and Morty, in which Rick is relatable precisely because he cannot transcend his need to justify himself. It's not that he craves love or approval, exactly, but he embodies the tricky emotions we all have about our interpersonal relationships. The people closest to us bring us the most pain! Relationships are effort, and often thankless effort! And yet they are also the site of our most desired and celebrated victories, our greatest joys and pleasures. I think I mentioned in a comment on a different topic recently the movie A Monster Calls, which explores the same themes from a slightly different angle (spoiler: the kid is conflicted because he does love his mom, deeply, but he kind of just wants her to die already, because her protracted illness is really screwing with his emotions).
I often encounter people who respond to contractualism in approximately this way--"what if I don't feel the need to justify myself to anyone, ever?"--and while it is maybe possible in theory, in practice we would identify such a person as a true sociopath, who still needs to pretend to justify themselves in most cases, since even sociopaths do usually need some support from society to live. The vast majority of people, on reflection, find that they do feel the need to justify themselves to a spouse, parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, someone whose good opinion of them matters to their overall well-being. This is why I draw human hedges around "universal" morality; I can conceive of some alien being that is wholly self-existent and self-sufficient, while also being eminently rational, that may have a separate form of morality I would find, well, alien. But even the least-connected of humans will probably fail to rise to that level.
Thank you again for your continued indulgence.
I think we agree that Rick Sanchez is an interesting character in part because it explores the limits of self-sufficiency. I disagree he is supernatural, however, at least in-universe. I think the setup is that he is someone whose intellect is so far off the chart as to render physical constraints non-existant. I also think part of the show's message is questioning whether, why, and what morals might apply to such a person.
When I was a lad I read a short story about a character who couldn't get along in society and committed some crime. As a result he was exiled to a kind of penal territory with no rules, but also no access. He was allowed to take with him anything, and ended up taking a completely reliable RV will full armor and food and ammo and energy to last a million years. Upon exile, he was promptly relieved of it entirely through a rogue's wiles (no force needed), and thereby forced to engage with his peers in exile. Ultimately he redeems himself by snitching on his new pals to the Republic. After our conversation, I expect this author (can't remember who) was exploring the contractualist ideas.
If I understand you correctly, contractualism's final authority rests on a particularity of the human condition where individual humans must, innately, remain part of the collective?
How does contractualism resolve Coases' lake problem?
It's final authority rests on reason. But yes, in the sense that "what we owe to each other" logically depends on the existence of a "we," contractualism doesn't have anything to say about what morality might look like if there were not a "we."
You'll have to be more specific. I think you might be asking questions about externalities, but first of all contractualism is a moral theory, not an economic theory. That said, my guess is that it would resolve the problem in the same way it resolves all problems, by conducting an analysis of the weights of interests and the objections individuals can raise on their own behalf to various principles for action.
This looks a little like a dodge. I don't understand how "reason" can be a final authority on anything, since reason requires premises? It would seem that perfect logic can produce widely different regimes and outcomes, depending on what question we ask of it, or what context we provide it. Intuition suggests this might be related to the paperclip machine problem.
The lake problem is a conceptualistic framework to determine resource allocation (including dealing with externalities), and as such is an economic question, but strongly implicates moral values.
The hypo goes something like this, paraphrased for my curosities. There's a lake in a mythical land where few people exist. The first person to find the lake is an old man, who fishes in the lake for subsistence. Some years later, another comes along and decides the lake is a fine place to grow yeast to feed his family. The new guy won't eat fish for religious reasons. Growing yeast kills all the fish the old man catches to eat. For the purposes of our exploration, there is no way the yeast can be grown that does not kill the fish. There's no other food for the old man to eat nearby.
The question is, who gets to use the lake, how, and why? The answer, it would seem to me, requires moral judgments.
You can read about Scanlon's "reasons fundamentalism" in his book Being Realistic About Reasons.
That seems right, but how you analyze the hypothetical will depend in large measure on whether you're writing a Hobbesian "state of nature" story, or whether there are further background details that can be discussed. As written, the hypo doesn't seem like a hard question at all; the old man needs fish to live. If he truly has no other alternatives, then he has an extremely weighty objection to a principle allowing the brewer to kill all the fish. You didn't specify that the brewer actually needs the lake to live, presumably the fact that he has a family means he's already got other resources, so he does not appear to have an equally weighty counterclaim. Now, if you're precommitted to some view preferring the "highest" or "best" use of something (utilitarians, for example), then sure, the question might seem hard. But it's not really hard at all, as you've written it: the old man needs the lake to live, the brewer doesn't.
We could easily go back and forth for a long time, modifying the hypothetical to pump intuitions in one direction or another, but the reason we could do this is precisely because morality is reasons-responsive, and adding or changing the relevant reasons can (and should!) change the moral judgments we reach on the matter. This is a very human process, but it is only one that even arises when we are committed to coexistence, at least in the abstract. Otherwise we would just shrug our shoulders and say "guess whoever kills the other one first gets to use the lake."
I think you read things into my hypo that are not there. For example, TNG is growing yeast to feed his family, not make beer. The implications are that one, he is vegetarian, and two, he has a family. I'm not sure you could draw the implication you did about outside resources, but let me be explicit, there are no other resources in the universe.
I'm not sure it matters, though, as you seem to have a presupposition regarding the primacy of human life. How do you move from pure reason to human life matters most?
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