I'll take "extinct notions of once-great institutions" for $1000, Alex

EDIT for elaboration: Simply put, the rise of "activist" journalism has entirely done away with any notion of objective reporting.

Granted, journalism to some degree has always had an activist bent to it, but now it's just blatant to the point where they're not even trying to hide it anymore.

VICE is really bad about this. They finance some of their more decent pieces with countless amounts of misinformed and frankly, venom-laced garbage clickbait. Most of their recent shit too has had way too large of a "oh this poor criminal" bent.

There's nothing most of these activist journalists hate more than the common working person, all the while having the gall to claim they're on your side.

They're in no one's corner but their own.

A reasonable argument as far as it goes.

However, it still doesn't solve the problem of how to enforce that morality where it seems that other people aren't following the rules even when they signed up to them.

eg. In the trolley problem, the logical choice for anyone who values their own freedom is to do nothing.

Why? Because to prosecute the person who does nothing, you'd have to jump several major hurdles.

a) The person is even aware of the problem. Being oblivious isn't a crime unless it's literally their job to be aware.

b) The person knows that the switch exists and how to use it. Trolley switches have a device that stops accidental activation.

c) The person would have been able to use the switch in the amount of time available, including shock time.

I'm assuming this person is referring to journalistic standards. Newspapers didn't just let anyone write articles they had to be written by someone with a degree in journalism or something similar and then reviewed by an editor. In theory if the news organization posts something wrong their reputation was at risk, which hopefully would provide incentive to not post false information. This whole process sending actual people out to the scene conducting interviews collecting information is very expensive. Whereas someone just providing their own 2 cents on any given news event does not cost anything beyond the time it takes for the individual writer to write it. The high start up costs of starting a newspaper company even back in their heyday prevented just anyone from being able to run their own newspapers, Although there were definitely were some newspapers that were far less reputable, often refered to as a "rag".

> And the error in the last section was treating X's freedom and Y's freedom separately. Freedom is an objective property that cannot reasonably be differentiated. Its not agent-relative, it is agency. There is no X's freedom or Y's freedom, there is only freedom that both X and Y happen to possess.

To make a statement like "you should not kidnap a person", you have to appeal to a value like "you value that person's freedom", not "you value freedom", which is nebulous and non-specific. Supposing that I was a psychopath and only cared about my own freedom (ie. Freedom(Me, Me)), what rational grounds do you have to make me care about anyone else?

Article is pretty bad. "Look: they changed the title of an article. Here are some polls."

Media treating bullshit coming from "conservatives" as reasonable is why we're in this mess to begin with. Amp up the liberal bias, I say.

> You can't get a "should" conclusion from "is" premises.

Not according to Mackie, Kitcher, and Joyce. The naturalistic fallacy is an extremely controversial position that has gone out of favor in recent decades due to critiques from people like Rawls, Rorty, and Mackie.

I believe that one of the biggest challenges\causes in regards to news bias is how news is made profitable compared to the past. Different demographics want different news sources because of their own internal viewpoints. Advertisers sponsor news agendas for their demographics targets. Watch the types of commercials and brands from Fox news vs MSNBC. They are different audiences, both politically, and what they buy.

Unfortunately due to money and people wanting news that confirms their existing biases it is difficult to get "fair" reporting. I don't think news has ever been fair and bias free in the past, but it appears be be getting worse, and thus public trust is dropping in news truth.

It would be nice if journalists could still be fairly paid, but we could get rid of all advertising associated with news specifically. I don't think that there is any realistic way to do this however without radical government overreach that I would personally disagree with.

I think such abstract conceptions of morality should either be based on or connect to an anthropological theory of how and why morality changes. To simply claim "slavery and exism" were morally "simple" dilemmas to solve strikes me as ahistorical.

Oh, trust in news media is long gone.

No such thing

Its not even morality, just logic. You can't get a "should" conclusion from "is" premises. This is just the naturalistic fallacy.

What purpose did gatekeeping serve?

Thanks for the review. The article doesn't require that any values be shared, it only states what values lead to morality. What percentage of people share these values (freedom and reason) isn't within the scope of my writing. And values outside of these two aren't relevant for meta-ethics.

As to the scenario you laid out, the issue relates to ethics rather than meta-ethics that the article is about, but I'll still address it. The values of freedom and security would have to be justifiable to someone else. We wouldn't let someone's irrational paranoia guide national security policy, and any reasons provided when making policy (and in the social contract) would need to be public and comprehensible to all that are affected.

And any national security policy would have to be guided by the reason-based moral principles of the social contract. If it goes outside of those principles and acts arbitrarily, then it loses its morality and hence its political authority (imagine a requirement that all redhead people be subject to a special reporting requirement). Only reason has the authority to decide the rights vs. security question. and there will be a range of acceptable policies that respect the boundaries of the social contract. And political communities can give different priorities to the social contract's moral principles based on the national facts and circumstances (it must still value those principles, but it can apply them and prioritize them differently based on reason). See here for a discussion on how the social contract can specify rights.

And the error in the last section was treating X's freedom and Y's freedom separately. Freedom is an objective property that cannot reasonably be differentiated. Its not agent-relative, it is agency. There is no X's freedom or Y's freedom, there is only freedom that both X and Y happen to possess.

Your article hinges on the idea that humans share values and therefore can come to a normative consensus. It is much more complex than that. Humans have many different values, often conflicting with each other, and each person weighs values and who the values apply to differently.

Some people value security more than freedom, for instance. Should a government do more invasive searches under the threat of a terrorist attack? Either they do nothing and potentially allow a terrorist attack, or they act to stop it and violate citizen’s freedoms in the process. This is a Trolley Problem. Your article suggests "No answer would be justifiable to all involved parties since they would all have a reasonable claim to not being [killed/invasively searched]". Your Trolley Problem article also states, "Like so many other life dilemmas, pure reason cannot provide a definite answer to the trolley problem. Only the free self can make a choice whenever there are sufficient reasons for either side of a decision." Basically, when we get to moral problems with any degree of complexity, your model of pure reason is insufficient.

Additionally, your reasoning is insufficient that "valuing freedom necessarily implies valuing the freedom of others". To show the gap in logic, let me present this statement in propositional logic:

Definitions: Freedom(X,Y) means that X values Y's freedom, Free(X) means that X is a free agent, and H is the set of humans. We can assume (∀X in H, Free(X)^Freedom(X,X)). "∀" means "for all"

So then your claim is that (∀X,Y in H, Freedom(X,X) ⇒ Freedom(X,Y)). Your justification in the linked article is "If others are regarded as having similar freedom to his own—by having the capacity to freely make decisions, including the decision whether or not to be moral—then he cannot deny the value of their own freedom". Propositionally, this is (if ∀X,Y in H, Free(X)^Free(Y)^Freedom(X,X) then Freedom(X,Y)). This does not follow. It assumes a symmetry that does not necessarily exist.

Overall, I caution you against playing loosely with assumptions about values. Can we even be sure that any two humans share the exact same set of values?

I think you can skip over a lot of the introductory stuff and get to the point. It covers a lot of territory, but none of it in enough depth to be useful.

As to the main proposal, I am attracted to the idea that morality is importantly related to what we can rationally agree to, so I’m kind of an audience for this kind of proposal. When your first offer your account of morality, I thought you were underestimating the amount of moral disagreement there is, and that demanding actual agreement about moral principles is not a viable standard. But, later it seemed like you thought morality only concerns what there is consensus about, which is why you say the trolley problem is not a moral dilemma at all — there’s no agreement here, and morality is based on rational agreement. I think this just puts too much outside the scope of morality which we would intuitively include within it.

Anyways, at one point you seem to say morality is based on hypothetical imperatives. You might. E interested in this paper by Philippa Foot.

Kant compromises his theory of ethics for sure. No statist system can be apriori.

> There are no "should" statements when examining morality through a pure evolutionary lens

If you really think that, I'd suggest picking up either Mackie's Ethics, Kitcher's The Ethical Project, or Joyce's The Evolution of Morality.

Equality does not somehow stem from rational agency into an observable and measurable feature. Even the first premise of ethics seems too difficult to justify.

It requires sort of argument from tradition or ideal theory so that we start from that people already accept atleast the baseline equality as non aggression and equal right to decide about other rules.

That works as long as people agree on them.

But another way Rawls uses is that all knowledge is a communal thing by definition. Science is valid only if the community agrees on the theory at hand. So ethics can be comparable science if there is a viewpoint that detaches from the aposteriori to apriorism that fits the idea of inductive logic (although Rawls speaks paradoxically of aposteriori apriori which he explains away with the ideal theory). And everyone who can do this has an equal vote on ethics, like science has its criterion (although it can lead to fallacy of expertise) So there is no many ethical theories, only peoole who have the virtue for ethics and who don’t.

"Should" falls into what's called "imperative thinking" - should, have to, must, ought to, etc. (What Dweck would call "fixed mindset") Then the question becomes should, according to whom? and based on which criteria and under which circumstances?

My personal criteria is : does the behavior create secure attachment or undermine secure attachment? (See attachment theory: "Becoming Attached - first relationships and how they shape our capacity to love" by Robert Karen)

I've found trustworthy, re-humanizing behaviors build secure attachment and untrustworthy, dehumanizing behaviors lead to disconnection and destroy secure attachment. These are the guidelines I use around trust:

The Trust Triangle - Authenticity, Empathy, Logic (what we say and how we say it)

The Anatomy of Trust - marble jar concept and BRAVING acronym

10 definitions of objectifying/dehumanizing behaviors - these erode trust

I try to choose behaviors that build trust and foster secure attachment. It's a strategy that seems to be paying dividends. My interpersonal relationships are much better and I feel much better, too bc I'm choosing behaviors that align with my values.

I mean it's never going backwards, but it is also anarchy to a large extent until social media companies make stricter rules but then people leave for the next new one where they can say anything they want with reckless abandon be it true or nowhere near it.

Gate-keeping served a purpose once upon a time, but it's gone now. People can still choose to look for credible press and they are out there, but it takes time and usually a subscription charge when all the lies and misinformation you can ever want is out there for free in seconds because it's all made up and a real news piece takes time and effort to be sure it is correct and accurate and fair.

Kant certainly wasn't providing a descriptive account, whereas Rawls didn't make his views very clear. Evolution is useful for explaining our desires, but it doesn't justify why these desires should be respected or what we should do given these desires.

There are no "should" statements when examining morality through a pure evolutionary lens and morality would be the same (the derivatives of the values of freedom and reason) even if we had evolved differently and developed different desires. Given a different evolutionary trajectory, our moral rules might be different, but meta-ethics remains the same.

That being said, science is useful for discovering the moral principles of the social contract, but it doesn't play a role in the first principles discussion that I'm focusing on.

I agree

> Thanks for the review. The biological adaption relates to descriptive morality, whereas I focus on normative morality.

That's far too quick and dismissive. I too am talking about the normative notion, there's just nothing more to that notion than the biological fact of it, nothing beyond that contingency that gives it anymore normative oomph (but nor should we care). But such an account is of course still normative because it describes morality as being action guiding. This is the standard sort of move that Darwinian philosophers like Mackie, Rorty, Ruse, Street, or Joyce will make. It's about naturalizing morality, not about presenting a "merely descriptive" account as opposed to a normative one. Even idealist philosophers like Rawls and Kant are simply giving a "descriptive account" of our intuitions about morality and justice in the same way I am, but this doesn't make their account any less normative than my own or that of other evolutionary ethicists.

> If the problem is with discovering non-reasonably rejectable reasons, then it's only a problem of administrability.

It's not, it's about defining what it means to be "reasonable". Like, sure, there is the further problem of actually figuring out what reasonable people would agree to, but that's largely derivative of your definition of what constitutes a reasonable person.

> However, what else would morality be, the code of conduct of our treatment of others, if it could not be reasonably accepted by others?

It could be a fact of the matter. It could be a collective delusion. It could be an optimal solution to a particular set of game theory problems. There are many things it could be beyond the Kantian notion you're endorsing.

Yes meta-ethical constructivism. I've read some of her work. For me, it has been either hit or miss and her focus on identity steers too much into subjectivism.

Here, I try not to make any assumptions, not even about rationality. Only that by valuing freedom and reason can we get moral principles. That's what is good about valuing freedom, you don't have to care about what people want, but only recognize that they have wants.

Thanks for the review. The biological adaption relates to descriptive morality, whereas I focus on normative morality.

If the problem is with discovering non-reasonably rejectable reasons, then it's only a problem of administrability. This is fine, and not a problem with the philosophy in principle. However, what else would morality be, the code of conduct of our treatment of others, if it could not be reasonably accepted by others? I'll discuss this in a later piece.