Seasons

Likewise, if there were a reasonable chance of talking him out of it without killing any of the babies, I would go for that.

And who decides what is a "reasonable chance"?

You don't know he's actually serious unless you wait for him to kill one baby, or at least start torturing it. And until he actually kills it, you still don't know how serious.
Even if he does torture one to death, there is no way of knowing that he'll kill the others. Or that if you do kill one for him, he'll abide by the bargain.
The relative pleasure he would get from torturing babies versus torturing you by offering the bargain is always going to be unknowable. Even if you had his complete case history and a perfect knowledge of all his previous behaviour, he is a free agent, possessed of free will. Only his choice can determine what happense to any or all of the babies - the odds, are entirely unquantifiable (even without reference to the future lives of the babies.)

As I see it, the only choice that you actually have is whether you choose to commit evil yourself. I would certainly plead with him not to do it; I might try to overpower him, even knowing I couldn't stop him; I might pray for a miraculous intervention; I might try to goad him into killing me, or attempt to kill or incapacitate myself, and thus remove a source of pleasure from the equation (with no agonized witness to play mind games with, he might be less likely to bother with the babies.)

But I wouldn't kill a baby, let alone painfully, even if I believed he was going to torture them all to death, because my belief is only ever going to be founded on complete ignorance of the odds governing the relative utility of my actions. The only calculation I can be sure of is that if I commit an evil act, then there will be more evil at that point in time than there was before, and that its consequences will resound into the future. It might forestall a greater evil, or it might be just as likely to contribute to a greater evil - I have absolutely no way of knowing what constitutes a "reasonable chance".

Dear Bev:

You justify our having moral notions by reference to the usefulness of those notions. But if usefulness is also merely subjective, then there is no fact of the matter as to whether our moral notions are useful or not; if I think they are not useful, that is 'true for me', and if you think they are useful, that is 'true for you', and there is nothing more to be said. But then, this notion of 'usefulness' is so trivial, it can hardly be used successfully to defend any other notion.

I don't think either Ulrike or I used that term.

You are right, neither of you declared yourselves to be relativists in so many words. But how can you avoid being a relativist with respect to morals, if you think that they are purely subjective? If they are purely subjective, there is no objective truth to the matter. "It is morally wrong to torture babies solely for fun" is 'true for X' if X believes it, and 'false for Y' if Y does not believe it, aand that is all that can be said. If there is no truth to the matter, then any method for reaching consensus would be as arbitrary as flipping a coin, or based entirely on convenience. So it seems to me that your position implies relativism, whether you choose to mention that fact or not.

Ironically a mental concept such as math is more objective in the abstract area of pure ideas, because that is where we have complete control and can be certain that these givens will get those results.

??? As far as I can see, we don't have the slightest control over whether 2+2=4. How would we go about arranging that 2+2=5?

a mental concept such as math

What is so mental about Math? Of course, our mathematical concepts are mental entities in some sense, but so are our concepts of physics, sex (at last, my favorite subject), geography, and so on. I cannot see that mathematical concepts are any more mental than any others.

Mathematical objects, such as numbers, are not particularly mental. If numbers were mental entities, then they could not have existed before there were any minds. But there was a whole number between 2 and 4 long before there were any minds in the universe. According to Physics, the universe obeyed certain mathematical laws from the first moment of its existence. Likewise, if all minds in the universe were to die out, not one truth of mathematics would disappear. Pi was a transcendental number long before anyone had the concept of pi or the concept of a transcendental number.

Math appears 'mental' to people because one can do Math just by thinking. This does not imply that the number 2 is somehow in our brains.

Dear Psimagus (4410):

It seems to me that our moral responsibilities do not depend on our having perfect knowledge; if they did, we would have no moral responsibilities at all, for we never have perfect knowledge.

Our moral responsibilities depend on what is true to the best of our knowledge.

Suppose I see someone about to eat something that I have good reason to believe is toxic. I am morally obligated to try to warn her. It is true that I could be mistaken in any number of my relevant beliefs. Perhaps it's not toxic; perhaps she's really an alien and it is nourishing to her; perhaps she is an evil dictator, and by letting her eat it I will liberate an entire people; perhaps she is deaf and will not hear my warning; perhaps she speaks a language in which the phoneme sequence of "Watch out! That's toxic!" means, "Lucky you! That stuff is delicious and nourishing!' Perhaps she despises me so much that she will eat it just because I tried to discourage her from doing so. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. You can never be sure what the consequences of your acts will be. Welcome to the human condition!

In spite of all the pitfalls of trying to figure out the universe, there are things that I am most justified in believing at any given time. If, to the best of my knowledge, the material will be poisonous to her, and if, to the best of my knowledge, she is not an evil dictator, and so on, then I am morally obligated to warn her even though every last one of my relevant belief might possibly be false.

The upside to all this is, that we have done our moral duty if we did our best. If I sincerely try to do the right thing, to the best of my ability and the best of my knowledge, this is all that can be asked of me. A switchman sees two long passenger trains heading rapidly toward each other, and it comes into his head that the switch is set so that they will collide. In order to avert disaster, he rushes to the switch and throws it. Alas, he is mistaken! The two trains would have passed each other on different tracks, if he had let the switch alone; instead, there is no a horrible accident killing hundreds of people. Is he morally at fault? Not at all. Given his beliefs at the time, it would have been morally wrong not to have tried to throw the switch.

The upside to all this is, that we have done our moral duty if we did our best.

I agree. But our best to... what?

I would say our best to avoid committing any evil acts ourselves, since this is the only choice that is truly within our power to make.

It seems you would advocate doing our best to minimize the net evil and maximize the net good by gambling on probable outcomes. But if you employ evil means in this pursuit, you're playing a game you can't know the odds on. And if you play it long enough, you are bound to lose - that's just the nature of gambling.

Given his beliefs at the time, it would have been morally wrong not to have tried to throw the switch.

I agree - he did his best, and throwing a switch with the intention of preventing evil is not only justifiable, but failing to do so would be of itself an evil act. The outcome is not the determining factor - the intention is. The choice here is between killing lots of people or none at all, and if he makes an honest mistake, that does not detract from his good intention (though he will probably still blame himself - that's human nature.)
A choice between good and evil is not the same as a choice between two evils.

would say our best to avoid committing any evil acts ourselves, since this is the only choice that is truly within our power to make.

Well, I imagine that everyone would agree with this. It's hard to believe that someone is going to say, "No, you should commit evil acts now and thhen!" But if two people disagree about what acts are evil, this principle is not going to be of much use, since it does not give any specific criteria. If two people disagree about what is evil, they will disagree about what this principle entails.

It seems you would advocate doing our best to minimize the net evil and maximize the net good by gambling on probable outcomes.

Actually I don't accept minimax as a general rule in morality, although it does apply in some cases.

There is a famous thought experiment called the "Inhospitable Hospital." A man, X, comes in to have his tonsils out. The operation goes well, and he is sleeping in a hospital bed, still knocked out by anesthesia.

5 people are brought into the emergency room: they have been in a terrible auto accident (not their fault). One of them needs a heart transplant, two need kidney transplant, a fourth needs a liver, and the fifth a pancreas. Otherwise they will die.

Unfortunately, the hospital is entirely out of stock on these items!

Then someone says, "But we have Mr. X! He has healthy organs of all those kinds! Let's just use his!" Appealing to maximization, he continues, "If we distribute X's organs, 5 people will live, and one will die. If we don't, one person will live and 5 will die." Clearly the arithmetic is against the survival of Mr. X!

But many people, including myself, have strong intuitions that it would be morally wrong to use Mr. X's organs this way (let us assume that his consent cannot be obtained).

So, since maximizing gives the wrong answer in at least one case, it is not a universaly valid principle.

Well, I imagine that everyone would agree with this. It's hard to believe that someone is going to say, "No, you should commit evil acts now and thhen!"

I would agree that torturing a baby to death is, of itself, evil. But you seem to be saying that if there is a greater good you consider to be achieveable (saving the other babies,) it might under certain circumstances be permissible to torture a baby to death.

I'm just very suspicious of the "greater good" and "lesser of two evils"

if I think they are not useful, that is 'true for me', and if you think they are useful, that is 'true for you',

With respect to morals, you are correct, although I do not like the the phrase "true for you" because it seems to imply that subjective truths are on par with the outside common reality of things that exist with or without humans. When your actions effect others in a common reality of what we think of a the real world, however, I can say that I will work according to what moral or useful in my own view. My view is subjective. I will act on it anyway.

??? As far as I can see, we don't have the slightest control over whether 2+2=4. How would we go about arranging that 2+2=5?

2 plus 2 equals 5 because of how we define numbers, addition and equal. I am basing my views primary on the works of Hempels' "On the Nature of Mathematics"
http://www.ditext.com/hempel/math-frame.html. Hemple said, for example, "In the light of this remark, consider now a simple "hypothesis" from arithmetic: 3 + 2 = 5. If this is actually an empirical generalization of past experiences, then it must be possible to state what kind of evidence would oblige us to concede the hypothesis was not generally true after all. If any disconfirming evidence for the given proposition can be thought of, the following illustration might well be typical of it: We place some microbes on a slide, putting down first three of them and then another two. Afterwards we count all the microbes to test whether in this instance 3 and 2 actually added up to 5. Suppose now that we counted 6 microbes altogether. Would we consider this as an empirical disconfirmation of the given proposition, or at least as a proof that it does not apply to microbes? Clearly not; rather, we would assume we had made a mistake in counting or that one of the microbes had split in two between the first and the second count. But under no circumstances could the phenomenon just described invalidate the arithmetical proposition in question; for the latter asserts nothing whatever about the behavior of microbes; it merely states that any set consisting of 3 + 2 objects may also be said to consist of 5 objects. And this is so because the symbols "3 + 2" and "5" denote the same number: they are synonymous by virtue of the fact that the symbols "2," "3," "5," and "+" are defined (or tacitly understood) in such a way that the above identity holds as a consequence of the meaning attached to the concepts involved in it."