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If Scott would play up his Jewishness, he might get a free pass.

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“not too rigorous version: Whatever morality is, it must be motivating.”

That’s a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition.

“If it’s not motivating, it’s not it morality” (1) ..may be true, but its not equivalent to…. “If it’s motivating, it’s, morality” (2)

And 2, or something like, is whatyou need to get your “ought”.

I can see that morality has something to do with motivation, but not the specific thing you are claiming. More rigour is needed.

“What we find motivating are our already existing desired ends, and there is no plausible justification for us to adopt ends that don’t follow from what we already find motivating. ”

Nothing in that is false, as stated, but I’m not sure you appreciate that almost some motivations are “gateway drugs”, … almost anything can follow from them. If you’re motivated to believe in the dicta of the prophet Zarquan, that one motivation would lead you to follow all Zarquans moral precepts. Or if you were motivated to be rational, you would accept the conclusion of any good, evidence based argument, including ethical conclusions.

And even if that is wrong, and there’s no way Caligula would change his behaviour, that doesn’t mean his behaviour is moral, which is the claim in question.

“If we were internally consistent, we would act in our own self-interests, i.e. pursue happiness and the ends that are instrumental to it.People can be internally inconsistent and fail to do so, but if they were properly rational, they would. Moral “oughts”, when they are true, are the “oughts” of practical rationality”

No they are not. Moral quandaries exist, and are often conflicts between ethics and self interest. That would logically impossible, by your theory.

”He has a motivation to torture people. If morality requires him to not torture people, it must motivate him to do so, which means he must have a motivating reason to not torture people. ”

As I have stated several times, a potential motivation is rationality.

And if that doesn’t motivate him, so what? That doesn’t make “torture is wrong” false. If someone is too irrational to believe that 2+2=4, that doesn’t invalidate 2+2=4.

“You can define them that way, but then there is doubt as to whether they exist.”Instrumental values can be justified by appeal to terminal values, but terminal values are the foundational values that are held despite them not being justified by appeal to any other values. The only coherent way I can imagine terminal values not existing is if all values are cyclically instrumental, as in “I want X because it’ll get me Y, I want Y because it’ll get me Z, and I want Z because it’ll get me X”, but this seems like an implausible structure of value, and I don’t think it’s what you’re arguing for. ”

Indeed. I’m arguing that you can’t know that an apparent terminal value is actually terminal in the sense that it is knowably logically independent of all the others, ie you can’t guarantee that someone won’t argue you out of one of your TV’s on the basis of the others.

”By your conception of epistemic rationality, the epistemic rationalist would reject all value.

An epistemic rationalist would value truth and rationality. They might be troubled by their inability to justify that, as philosophers often are. The ideal of zero arbitrary beliefs and values may be unobtainable, but that doesn’t make any amount of arbitrariness unacceptable.

” In case I’ve been unclear, I’m not arguing for amoralism. I’m arguing that the amoralist gives a good reason to reject external conceptions of morality”

Which are what? I haven’t seen you argue aong the lines that “as a rational person , you should reject external ,morality, because…”. I’ve only seen you argue that some people would not, as a matter of fact, follow external morality, whether there are rational reasons for it or not,

“, but he fails to reject internal morality as constituted by practical reasoning, as in ethical egoism.”

You need to argue that efficiently following arbitrary values is any kind of morality. Caligula looks like a counterexample.

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tl;dr, not too rigorous version: Whatever morality is, it must be motivating. What we find motivating are our already existing desired ends, and there is no plausible justification for us to adopt ends that don’t follow from what we already find motivating. If we were internally consistent, we would act in our own self-interests, i.e. pursue happiness and the ends that are instrumental to it. People can be internally inconsistent and fail to do so, but if they were properly rational, they would. Moral “oughts”, when they are true, are the “oughts” of practical rationality (or a subset of them, depending on how broadly you define “morality”).

“He needs to provide justification for the claim that egoism is what he ethically-should be doing.”

He has a motivation to torture people. If morality requires him to not torture people, it must motivate him to do so, which means he must have a motivating reason to not torture people. If there is such a reason, what is it?

“You can define them that way, but then there is doubt as to whether they exist.”

Instrumental values can be justified by appeal to terminal values, but terminal values are the foundational values that are held despite them not being justified by appeal to any other values. The only coherent way I can imagine terminal values not existing is if all values are cyclically instrumental, as in “I want X because it’ll get me Y, I want Y because it’ll get me Z, and I want Z because it’ll get me X”, but this seems like an implausible structure of value, and I don’t think it’s what you’re arguing for. (And even then one could argue that while none of X, Y, nor Z are terminal values themselves, the combination of them is a terminal value.)

“Arbitrary values and epistemic rationality are inconsistent in the sense that an ideal or maximal epistemic rationalist would not tolerate arbitrary values or beliefs.”

By your conception of epistemic rationality, the epistemic rationalist would reject all value.

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In case I’ve been unclear, I’m not arguing for amoralism. I’m arguing that the amoralist gives a good reason to reject external conceptions of morality, but he fails to reject internal morality as constituted by practical reasoning, as in ethical egoism.

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After the last time Scott mentioned the series, I went and read Kushiel’s Dart. And I have to say that while it was great as pornography, it seemed pretty trite as fantasy. Does the series get better as it goes on, or am I likely to be unimpressed by the rest of them if I was unimpressed by the first one?

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