Summary: freedom + reason = morality. The basis of normativity is inherently free individuals discovering reasonable justifications for restrictions on freedom. Asking "why should I be moral?” already presupposes (in the question itself) the values of freedom and reason, as well as reason’s priority over freedom.

Since the questioner values freedom, but recognized reason as an authority over freedom, the questioner must recognize and value the freedom of others, having no justification to do otherwise. The questioner has no reasonable basis to value only his own freedom, given that he possesses the same freedom as others. Any differentiation would therefore be arbitrary and would violate his own valuing of reason.

I’ll only respond to one quote: “If the skeptic says his X is valuable, then according to reason, X is valuable among others.”

Clearly false. I have a finger painting I did as a 3 year old (and now have no living relatives), that finger is valuable to me but no one else. Don’t know what this does to the basic argument proposed, but caused me to lose interest.

Some things I have have sentimental value. They have property X. Things you have also have sentimental value, the same property X. I can say that I don’t value your painting as much as you do. But I cannot say that the painting lacks sentimental value (clearly it does to you).

Ok but it is not “valuable among others”.

If someone were to say that a valued sentimental value, they wouldn’t be acting according to that value if they ripped up that painting. The painting has sentimental value, regardless of who imposes that value onto it.

Ok,I’ll go even farther, value is only relevant at the margin. The vale of something is based on the consequence of having one unit more or one unit less, and this will vary according to circumstances.

Oxygen is of value, but the difference in value from someone who doesn’t have enough, and for someone who has never experienced scarcity is such that you don’t get much traction from asserting, albeit truthfully, that oxygen is valuable.

Once you include my feelings as a source or metric of value, you end up on a very slippery slope.

Which ties back to my finger painting. If I lost it on the street and it was found by a street cleaner, or anyone for that matter, how much value would they attribute to the actual finger painting. I think you conflate the value attributed to the physical object vs the value that some others might, or might not, attribute to my subjective sense of loss.

But I’m curious, if the quote I referenced is false, does the argument fall?

Oxygen isn’t valuable in itself. It’s the living that we value. OP is talking about things that we value for their own sake.

I take the values of reason and freedom as a given. I don't question those values, only recognize that they are implied in the skeptic's question. Morality derives as a consequence of those values. So if someone said they valued reason and X, then they must value X generally. Otherwise they'd run afoul of valuing reason.

What value we choose to impose on something is always subjective, it comes internally. There is no "value" within the material of a thing. There's only our imposition of value.

Couldn’t that just be read that their own sentimental items are valuable to them?

Someone who values you could find value in your macaroni art.

In fact, I will be the one to say, I value your art because you made it at a time in your life when your thoughts were pure and innocent. I find art like that extremely valuable. :)

>Asking "why should I be moral?” already presupposes (in the question itself) the values of freedom and reason, as well as reason’s priority over freedom.

What about a person who values only their own freedom, and has no inclination to stack their faculty of reason against that of anyone else?

>the questioner must recognize and value the freedom of others, having no justification to do otherwise.

What if it doesn't occur to them that any justification is necessary?

I propose an alternative reason for people to behave in a way that approximates local custom, even if they have no natural inclination to think of themselves as equal members of society, with the "two-way street" that implies:

It makes life easier by removing sources of hindrance.

If I don't go around beating people over the head, then I won't get arrested for doing that. Maybe I really want to do that, but I want to be free even more.

Just the opposite. He's saying that if we accept that our sentimental things hold value, we should respect that others' sentimental objects hold similar value to them.

Because I don't want to throw away my macaroni picture, I should not force others to throw away theirs.

You aren’t disagreeing with me. We value sentiments for their own sake. The macaroni picture isn’t what he really values, it’s the feelings that the picture elicits.

Right, but he's suggesting that it holds true. Through experience, I can guarantee that my macaroni picture is worth absolutely nothing to a random stranger. They may recognize that it holds value to another, but they are not that other and will trash it.

Nobody puts up "found macaroni art" posters.

Imagine if we used the internet for something constructive that wasn't pared down into a "marketplace" of ideas, but rather became a central conversation for the most important ideas, where you didn't need a presence to have a valid contribution, merely an opinion that could be voiced with a vote, a non-binary vote with the freedom to change one's opinion at any given moment, to elaborate on one's thought processes and learn from others.

Imagine if the statistics from that process were available to all people everywhere, and the output was verifiable such that it wasn't subject to any of the kinds of trickery we see in a divided, corporate-controlled world such as we currently live in.

Could we build a conversation out of logical filters and linguistic indices that would lead us to the answers we seek, if the process were truly educational and not just feeding the whims of a billion narcissistic aims?

If the beliefs were studied, versus being codified, could we not eventually find a calculus of human thought that eviscerated the authoritarian structures that now influence us, which we have been attempting to overthrow for millennia as raging loners, dying in the darkness, unheard?

If this was a useful project, would it not direct the path of future human evolution, by giving us a strong notion of who we are and what we really want, instead of doing this same old tired work of attempting to define or codify morality subjectively?

I say "subjectively" because of all of the instances of people blindly struggling to incorporate the topic of subjectivity into the conversation here. We are struggling with the automation of autocracy and that can't be overcome with a purely subjective perspective, creating a significant open code dilemma/solution issue.

Can we ever truly have a notion of what morality means if we can't do something which should be as simple as this, given that the technology to do so has existed for decades already, in the face of ubiquitous public confusion and frustration over it's absence (the absence of ANY solution that we can all agree on, that is)?

You aren’t understanding. The sentiments that the macaroni picture elicit are the valuable thing that we can recognize in another. It’s not about the value of the picture, it’s about recognizing the value of sentimental feelings.

I value your finger.

But, joking aside, I see what you mean. I get the impression that in the effort to be too general, they under-specified the criteria for what X is in that statement.

>> Once you include my feelings as a source or metric of value, you end up on a very slippery slope.

What about the trolley problem? If subjectivity has no place in moral philosophy, why even ask the trolley question? If we're throwing feelings out the window and measuring by objective value, then we're valuing human life by how many people are alive. In that case, if 3 people died instead of 1, which creates 2 excess deaths in a "value pool" of 8 billion people, that's a .00000000025% loss of value. That is so negligible that it renders the trolley problem silly and not worth thinking about.

Even if you upped the stakes and put 4 billion people on a trolley track, it still wouldn't mean much from a purely objective standpoint. We've done just fine in the past with far less people than that, and it's not even close to the brink of extinction, so objectively, the trolley problem doesn't matter, and neither does death in general.

The reason that death and the trolley problem are important is because of the subjective feelings of the loved ones left behind by the people who got run over. They're not your loved ones, but the problem expects you to empathetically consider the people who would be affected emotionally.

Similarly, if a street cleaner were to find your finger painting, they would have a moral obligation to use empathy, recognize that a kid's finger painting may hold sentimental value to someone, and do what they can to return the finger painting to that someone. If they are incapable of returning it, that's that, they did what they could. But it would be immoral to throw it out immediately with no second thought.

Even if that is literally the definition of their job?

Their job is to remove clutter from the streets. Returning the finger painting to its owner removes it from the streets, therefore it isn't mutually exclusive from doing their job.

The article doesn't really explain what "reason" is supposed to mean in this context, but the central argument is very much dependent on this one definition.

> Second, the value of reason is established by asking why. The question isn’t “who shall force me to be moral” or “what is moral,” both of which imply an outside force imposing morality through authority. But rather the question is like “what argument for morality can you provide that I can be reasonably expected to accept?” The skeptic will only accept a reason-based response.

What is a "reason-based response"? Obviously,"the happiness of people with reddit accounts named 'eyespout' should be maximized" is not what you would consider a "reason-based response", but on what grounds exactly? Usually by "reason" we mean a system of statements that can be derived from axioms... but every logical system depends on axioms, why can't I choose whatever I want as an axiom for my system?

What constraints are you putting on your allowed axioms?

>If the skeptic recognizes his own freedom, as well as that freedom being subject to reason, then he must accept the freedom of others. It cannot be reasonable that the skeptic’s own personal freedom is the only freedom worth valuing.

That requires a constraint on what "reason" is: whatever this "reason" means has the property that "it cannot be reasonable that the skeptic’s own personal freedom is the only freedom worth valuing". But why exactly would "reason" have that property?

Reasons is a public justification in favor of something. And if you want to constrain someone's freedom, it must be on the basis of some justifiable reason that couldn't be reasonably rejected.

Since freedom is a property of the skeptic, and the skeptic has no reasonable basis from differentiating this property from the equal properties of others, the skeptic would have to recognize and value the freedom of others. There is no reason to prioritize his freedom-asset over that of others which can be publicly justified.

I don't think this answers my questions. I gave you a specific example, why is "in order to maximize the happiness of EyeSprout" not a good public justification? The above is an objective basis for differentiating my freedom from that of others; it's really a description of how some atoms in some server's memory are arranged. You claim that it's not reasonable, but why is it not reasonable?

The key point here is that people are not identical, and I can always define some set of properties that distinguish me from other people and hence value my freedom from other people. There are more "common" ways to distinguish people, such as based on they contribute to society, or how much money they make. Are you saying that no such set of conditions is "reasonable"? But you have been somehow restricting your moral system to only include humans. Why is only including humans a "reasonable" differentiation while other things are not? In general, why are some methods of differentiation "reasonable" and some not?

The reason I'm a stickler for this point is because there's an explanation I do accept for why people should follow morality, and the answer turns out to be "because morality is designed so that it's usually in their self-interest to follow morality", i.e. morality follows a game-theoretic stability principle.

If it can be reasonably rejected, then its not a good reason. No one would want to bind their freedom to that specific reason.

No people are not identical, but they possess identical freedom. There's no basis for differentiating one's own freedom from another. In the same way that you cannot say you are more "alive" than another living being (except metaphorically) being "more free" makes about as much sense. If you value reason, then you can't deny that people's freedom are equal, since there is no basis for stating otherwise.

If morality is just rational interest, subject to game theoretic stability, then its not morality, just rationality. Why not be a free rider if there are no consequences to being so? Thats what I mean by morality.

> If someone were to say that a valued sentimental value, they wouldn’t be acting according to that value if they ripped up that painting. The painting has sentimental value, regardless of who imposes that value onto it.

Can you elaborate what you mean? If someone were to say that they have a sentimental value towards a painting; then yes, given no good overriding reasons, they wouldn't rip the painting because that would go against them valuing the painting.

But that example only demonstrates that the paining has sentimental value for the particular subject who values them.

That doesn't say anything, however, whether the value exists for others as /u/timbgray was concerned about. It may but it doesn't seem like it need to.

In fact, the example makes more sense if we think of the "valuing" as a relational-functional orientation of the subject towards an object that induces certain behaviorial dispositions which allows folk-psychological predictions (like the subject will be resistent to ripping the painting apart, the subject will be upset if the painting is ripped etc.).

Instead you seemed to be making the "value" intrinsic to the painting itself as if values can be "imposed" to objects by subjects, and the values remain imposed even after the death of all subjects. A skeptic can easily resist this move. The same move is also made in the article where value of freedom valuable by some objective standard, thus self-freedom is made as valuable as other-freedom.

>No one would want to bind their freedom to that specific reason.

By that, do you mean: That specific reason (assuming you're talking about the reddit account name condition) is easy enough to change (by, say, someone hacking one's account or something), and no one is willing to lose their freedom over that (their account being hacked) so it's not a good condition?

Then is the condition just about how easy something is to change? i.e. the value of a person's freedom shouldn't change very easily under realistic circumstances? That does sound like a decent functional definition, it can work.

>If you value reason, then you can't deny that people's freedom are equal, since there is no basis for stating otherwise.

That paragraph is hard to understand, but at the end, do you just mean that qualitative/discrete properties of a person's freedom should be equal? A good argument for that is that there are a continuous spectrum of people and any discrete cut we introduce in that continuity would necessarily be arbitrary.

So on one hand, it's can make sense to restrict people's freedom of action in the sense of giving them varying amounts of income because income is a continuous property, but it doesn't make sense to restrict people's freedom of action by allowing or disallowing specific actions because it's a discrete property and would introduce an arbitrary cut?

i.e. your central argument is basically a topological one? That's an interesting idea and something I could get behind.

Edit: or more specifically, in the case of two continuous properties, any map/dependence would have some arbitrary parameters, so we can't really "reduce" it by making everyone equal. But when you map a continuous space to a discrete space, there's a clear preference there.

-------------------

My own framework isn't really important to this conversation, but to explain some things:

>If morality is just rational interest, subject to game theoretic stability,

No, that's not quite what I mean. Morality has the property of (approximate) stability, but it is not uniquely defined by stability. There are many distinct systems with the property of stability and some of them can be called "morality" while calling others morality would be ridiculous.

>Why not be a free rider if there are no consequences to being so?

In any realistic situation, no one is able to tell ahead of time whether there are consequences or not, and just assuming there are consequences tends to lead to better results than constantly worrying about whether there are consequences.

But yeah, I get it, I tend to treat morality descriptively rather than prescriptively, which is a slightly different question. It's a matter of my interests; I always find the descriptive problem more interesting. Same thing happens when I talk about the problem of induction, it's more interesting to me to talk about when we can induct and not if we can induct.

What the painting has is sentimental value, so if the person said that they valued sentimental value, they would have to value the sentimental value of the painting.

Although no one would normally say that they valued sentimental value itself since its agent-relative. Yet freedom, on the other hand, is agency itself. It can be thought of instead as a possession. It doesn't depend on an agent's perspective because that's what freedom is, an agent's perspective. Our freedom is identical to one another as an asset. There is no basis on which it can be differentiated like utility can be (since its also agent-relative).

Thanks for the engagement, let me know if this addresses your concern.

> What the painting has is sentimental value

To the person.

> Yet freedom, on the other hand, is agency itself. It can be thought of instead as a possession. It doesn't depend on an agent's perspective because that's what freedom is, an agent's perspective.

This seems a bit spurious. An agent can quite coherently take freedom to a form of capacity, and they can value their capacity. Moreover, I don't see what relevance here is for reflexivity. A self-conscious being valuing their self-conscious is valuing, in a sense, that which they are reflexively, but that doesn't make the valuing ~agent-relative. Even if we accept the freedom is an agent's perspective itself (which is a very weird phrasing), there is no clear incoherency in an agent reflexively valuing their own perspective/or their own agency -- in relation to their own agent-perspective itself.

If we say that kind of valuing is "illegal", it's not clear to me what kind of "value" any freedom is even left with.

Moreover, there is a trivial sense, in which freedom can be differentiated. For example, one agent can be free to act in different ways, and another agent can be barred (perhaps imprisoned; shackeled). Freedom in concrete instantiation, is then tied to particular agents.

Although, you could make a case if the skeptic valued freedom as such (in that case, the skeptic to be consistent may need to value freedom for all if we assume everyone shares the relevant kind of potential for freedom), but the skeptic may start with valuing "own-freedom" (the specific freedom that exists in the specific relation to oneself) rather than "freedom as such". The reason to move towards valuing freedom as such opposed to the particular capacity of freedom existing in the specific relation to oneself seems to be still missing.

The reasonable basis for valuing ones own freedom over others is that the questioner is himself and other people are not. You generally are not making decisions about what to value from an external reference point otherwise I'd be just as motivated to raise other people's kids as my own.

“The questioner has no reasonable basis to only value only his own freedom”

Of course they have a basis. Placing oneself above those around you is pretty much the rule for all living things. Self-preservation/selfishness over others is a very valid basis. It’s the most fundamental of basis.

But it’s because the skeptic values reason as well, that they would have to have a justification to value their own freedom. They would have to have a non-arbitrary difference between their freedom and others’ freedom for them to justify valuing only their own. And because freedom is equal, in that a difference is not possible, then the skeptic would have to value freedom generally.

This is intuitive as well. We understand that free beings have value compared to non-free beings (inanimate objects). We wouldn’t have a reasonable justification to prioritize only our own freedom is freedom is equal.

What’s being valued isn’t living status or welfare but the power of agency. Agency isn’t agent-relative but it’s agency itself. It’s a possession which everyone has in equal capacity and no justifiable difference exists (you can’t say that one is more free than others).

If we both have possession X, and I value my X for itself, then I can’t say that your exact possession X isn’t valuable because I am me. It’s not a reason that can’t be reasonably rejected.

Children meanwhile are valued through an agent-relative relationship, unique between child and parent. But agency isn’t agent-relative but it’s agency itself. It’s a possession which everyone has in equal capacity and no justifiable difference exists (you can’t say that one is more free than others).

>If we both have possession X, and I value my X for itself, then I can’t say that your exact possession X isn’t valuable because I am me. It’s not a reason that can’t be reasonably rejected.

Since the question is whether I should value you you having freedom as much as I value me having freedom the proper analogy would be the question of whether I should value you you possessing X as much as I value me possessing X. In that case, again, the obvious reasonable reason for someone to prefer themselves having X more than someone else having X is because they are themselves and other people are other people. What's unreasonable about this?

>Children meanwhile are valued through an agent-relative relationship, unique between child and parent. But agency isn’t agent-relative but it’s agency itself. It’s a possession which everyone has in equal capacity and no justifiable difference exists (you can’t say that one is more free than others).

I'll give you that freedom is not an entity whose value is agent-relative so in that sense my example falls down here. However, as I've said above, the question is not whether my freedom is more valuable than someone else's it's whether there is any reasonable justification for me to value myself having freedom more than I value someone else having freedom and there the obvious reason is that I am me and they are them. In this sense all values are agent-relative. I don't value things from a third-person perspective.

Not valuing the same, but valuing at all. Only in the former question can you can get into issues of degrees. But the latter is binary.

Ah ok. I think my argument still works if you substitute valuing the same for valuing at all but at least I understand you better now.

Then I still wouldn’t say there is a justification for valuing’s someone freedom at 0, given the status of freedom as an agency creating asset, rather than dependent on personal agency. So any claim that “X is valuable because it’s mine” isn’t justifiable since X’s value doesn’t rely on that persons personal agency.

I think saying X's value here is confusing. If I say that I value my neighbors Tesla then the implication is that I want it for myself. If I say that I value my neighbors freedom the implication is that I want my neighbor to have freedom which is actually contrary to the first example.

Well your neighbor in that case already has freedom. Now it’s just about recognition and valuing of freedom. But I wouldn’t argue that people would necessarily want others to have freedom (say non-conscious animals). All I argue is that freedom is equal in one dimension and because it’s not agent relative, must have a universal value in itself.

> justification to value their own freedom.

Skeptic is interested in being consistent. They can't say "I value x but I don't value x", and they can't say "I value freedom as such but I don't value x's freedom" and so on. But as long as they are consistent, they don't see the need to provide justifications for why they value what they value. The skeptic can say they value "their own freedom, but not others'", it seems completely consistent to me. The "difference" is merely that their own freedom is the capacity that they have, and they can exercise; and the skeptic values things that are related to themselves in an empowring manner.

You can say that's an "arbitrary" difference. But I am not sure what criteria for "non-arbtirariness" is here. Any "random" difference should go to allow the skeptic being consistent. You may say that the skeptic has to justify why the skeptic cares about the "arbitrary difference". But, it seems odd to ask justification for "values", because they usually turn into explanation in terms of other "values". It's not the kind of thing that can be derived from laws of logic. The skeptic may be Humean; allowing reason to be slave to passions, and allow some values to be just brute psychological force (like hunger). The skeptic values 75% dark chocolate rather than chocolate in general, because he just does. Similarly the skeptic values things that increases the power of self (like the particular capacity of freedom (not freedom in general) that they possess) because the skeptic simply does.

> We understand that free beings have value compared to non-free beings (inanimate objects). We wouldn’t have a reasonable justification to prioritize only our own freedom is freedom is equal.

I don't "understand" that free beings "have" value. I simply brutely find myself respecting the freedom of others as my my own given no overriding reasons.

>Agency isn’t agent-relative but it’s agency itself.

.......lol?

> It’s a possession which everyone has in equal capacity

No, they really don't have an equal capacity. Not hypothetically, realistically, or even in any manner is it equal.

> no justifiable difference exists (you can’t say that one is more free than others)

Agency over oneself compared to not having agency over another entity is a massive difference.

​

There unfortunately seems to be some big lapse in mutual comprehension here.

Well in that case my critique of what you're saying is entirely based on me misunderstanding you.

However, if all you're saying is that we acknowledge that freedom as value regardless of whose freedom it is, how does that belief lead to any constraints on our own behavior? If we're acknowledging that I may have a reasonable reason not to want other people to have freedom then it would seem my actions aren't necessarily constrained in any way and therefore I don't have to be moral.

Yep, that’s the next step. Once the value of people’s freedom is recognized, they’ll act according to that value by obeying the term of the social contract, the expression of individuals’ freedom.

You’re saying “related to itself” but what do you mean by that? If it’s something physical like the body, then any difference is still arbitrary. For instance, if the cup on my desk has a certain value, it has that value regardless of what desk it happens to be on. It wouldn’t make sense for it to change value if its physically on another desk (or if it did, that would require an additional premise that I’m not assuming). And any equivalent cup would have the same value.

But if you mean “related to itself” as in someone’s personal agency, then what I’m talking about doesn’t relate to itself. It’s just agency and doesn’t depend on someone’s personal agency. The thing doesn’t have value from relating to itself. It’s just a thing with value.

But that would seem to imply that I want other people to have freedom which I thought we agreed doesn't follow.

> If it’s something physical like the body

It could be the physical body, the organism, it could be some non-physical soul; we can be agnostic to the metaphysics. But yes, we can go along with the particular physical body.

> difference is still arbitrary

But what makes a difference "arbitrary"? And what's wrong with the Skeptic valuing some "arbitrary" difference?

> For instance, if the cup on my desk has a certain value, it has that value regardless of what desk it happens to be on.

Let's go with this example. Perhaps there is a skeptic who finds the cup valuable only if it is arranged in the desk in a certain way but not otherwise. He doesn't find the cup in itself valuable. So what is the problem with that? The fundamental values can be just brute physcological impulses; why should the skeptic need to provide any reason and justification for that? Similarly the skeptic may not find freedom by itself valuable, simply freedom as possessed by himself - the physical organism (or whatever).

> It wouldn’t make sense for it to change value if its physically on another desk (or if it did, that would require an additional premise that I’m not assuming)

What additional premise? The point I am making is that people are not compelled to value some high-level universals. They can value particulars with specific relations to their own physical embodied system and history. You can't just say it's all "arbtirary" differences.

> And any equivalent cup would have the same value.

Not necessarily. A skeptic (or even any normal person), may value a certain cup more because of the specific history they share with the cup. An otherwise materially equivalent cup may not just have the same value for the skeptic (of course, we can fool the skeptic by replacing the valued cup with a replica and misrepresent the value, but that's irrelevant).

> Ok but it is not “valuable among others”.

More than one person has expressed disagreement in this very thread though.

What meaning are you ascribing to the word "is" in this context? What does it refer to?

> The value of something is based on the consequence of having one unit more or one unit less, and this will vary according to circumstances.

Perhaps, but that observation may not be comprehensive, there may be other variables involved in other (than your) implementations of ValueAmount(Object something).

> Which ties back to my finger painting. If I lost it on the street and it was found by a street cleaner, or anyone for that matter, how much value would they attribute to the actual finger painting. I think you conflate the value attributed to the physical object vs the value that some others might, or might not, attribute to my subjective sense of loss.

I think you might be conflating your opinion of how things are with how they really are?

Whether or not a piece of what looks like garbage abandoned on the street, might have some value, sentimental or other, is not a good reason to claim that this particular “X according to reason is valuable among (sic) others”, regardless of the value it might or might not have for me. I am disagreeing with the OP’s general assertion of value.

> Whether or not a piece of what looks like garbage abandoned on the street, might have some value, sentimental or other, is not a good reason to claim that this particular “X according to reason is valuable among (sic) others”, regardless of the value it might or might not have for me.

Perhaps, but this is other than the current scenario, which is where you have asserted: "it is not “valuable among others”."

Have you substantial evidence to support this assertion as being substantially more than merely a personal opinion?

> I am disagreeing with the OP’s general assertion of value.

And due to the manner in which you have done it, you have acquired a burden of proof.

>the skeptic values reason. An arbitrary difference would violate that value.

> if its arranged in a certain way, then just replace my example with the cup and the desk together. The example can be anything with inherent value.

> the assumption that the value is dependent on something else. The premise is that X has value, not that X's value depends on Y. What I argue is that freedom has inherent value. Again, its not agent dependent since freedom is agency.

> If the cup is valued due to sentimental value, then its not inherent value. Its value is agent-relative.

So the argument is only aimed at skeptics who accepts the notion of "inherent value"? Not at a more radical skeptic who is skeptical of the very notion of the possibility of values being "inherent" in object in a stance-independent sense?

Wouldn't valuing reason also be arbitrary?

You can’t have morality without values, specifically freedom and reason

You need values to have morals and what the skeptic values is a given

Then what's the problem with also arbitrarily valuing the freedom you have and not the freedom someone else has? Since clearly there is no inherent problem with arbitrarily valuing things.

I am not talking skeptics who denies values per se, but inherent stance-independent values. So the radical skeptic may brutely stance-dependently value reason, his-own-freedom and such but not believe that reason has inherent agent-independent value, or that freedom-as-such or even his-own-freedom has inherent value beyond the psychological contigencies of people relating to them in a "valuing" manner. Thus the radical skeptic is not sure if value is a thing or a property rather than being a process-in-act -- a "value-ing" associating with how the agent relates to a thing, concept, or a capacity.

And moreover, the skeptic may be a skeptical towards moral realism (beyond there being game-theoretically stable principles for agents to modulate their "powers" by considering trade-offs involving different valuing of different agents)

Because reason is valued.

Then valuing freedom on it's own should also go against valuing reason, right? Because it's arbitrary, and thus irrational.

Basically, both "I value freedom" and "I value my own freedom" are by your own admission arbitrary values. If the latter goes against valuing reason because it's arbitrary, why doesn't the former? If the former is acceptable because you need values to have morals, why isn't the latter?

The skeptic already values freedom, hence why he's asking. You can value both freedom and reason. However, freedom isn't agent-relative. Valuing freedom in one requires valuing it universally.

"But it’s because the skeptic values reason as well, that they would have to have a justification to value their own freedom. They would have to have a non-arbitrary difference between their freedom and others’ freedom for them to justify valuing only their own."

By your own admission, it's not that it's impossible to value ones own freedom (which wouldn't even make sense because people clearly do that all the time), but that it would be arbitrary and thus irrational to do so, which brings us back to my question.

I think the thing here is that you believe extrinsic properties are irrational to value, but intrinsic ones are not, and I don't see a meaningful difference. Is this accurate?

[deleted]

This is idealism.

Start with the realities of life, and then derive principles from it, and then those principles may guide the couse, but they are not nor ever have been the starting point of social being. And, as a result, these built principles are not eternal truths, but ultimately, contingent to the society which produced us, our biological evolution, our state of development. Superstructure atop the base.

If you want a reason to do well, nothing external can provide that. It's an axiomatic assumption to do right by people. That gets the job done much faster. We take axiomatic assumptions to do math. We take axiomatic assumptions to do science. We use them because they get the job done, nothing more, nothing less.

If someone wants to act to harm people, they may be reminded they live in a sea of people, and that this person is dependent upon those people, and they can either respect that, and be respected by us all as our social whole, or they don't, and society owes them no kindness. Our interdependence is a far stronger basis for moral arguments. By starting with the isolated "free" individual, the brain in the cloud, you start with someone who does not exist and who we do not meet. Whatever this imaginary person is compelled to accept will hardly be influential upon the real people.

But otherwise it was a good essay!

Thank you!

However, if you don't do the work of meta-ethics, normative ethics tends to get sloppy. Terms go undefined and people adopt different normative standards. It's uncommon but necessary to start with first principles before getting into normative and applied ethics. Meta-ethics may be too philosophical and abstract for some, but the current confusion over ethics can be explained by the skipping of this first step.

Conflicting class interests can also lead to rational agents in incompatible formations- their disagreement over the proper course of class society is not confusion, but clarity.

I discuss that here. The social contract needs to be based on reason, rather than power. Class conflict may be useful in getting both sides of an issue and creating more accurate moral conclusions. But this conflict is instrumental.

You could, if you wanted, have a referendum to affirm a social contract. Until we do that, I do not care about the concept, I never consented to these conditions except through my refusal to commit suicide in the face of our indignities (how voluntary)

And, more pressingly, the essay never mentions class. It seems, frankly, suspicious for it to never come up, given the central importance of production and the management of production in our daily life.

I think you aren't being attentive enough to the manner in which you and your consciousness and your capacity for reason are a social product with historically determined characteristics. Much how Aristotle, or our own Founding Fathers, at the top of Slave Societies, could wax poetic about the liberties, while owning people. Were they cruel liars? Were they stupid? No. (Well, the slaves might disgree). At least, not really. But they committed the same error as you do. Really put yourself in their shoes, what do they miss? Probably a few things jump out. Carry forward, to the present, what is it that you might miss?

And if you think we have overcome the brutalities of history, think about how you can buy avocados in winter, and if the guy who plucked them for us is granted the same liberty. That is the water we swim in, which still molds our thought.

Because it's a well written rebuke to Social Contract Theory: David Hume, Of the Original Contract might be up your alley.

https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cofc.edu/dist/8/406/files/2014/09/David-Hume-Of-the-Original-Contract-1kif9ud.pdf (pdf warning)

I discuss hypothetical vs actual consent here. The contract is based on reason, so if there is a reason for prioritizing someone's identity (like class) to serve as a justification for restricting others, you should provide them.

>The contract is based on reason

Objectively, it isn't. You want it to be. But what binds us in real life isn't. Or was it just emanantly reasonable when we slaughtered millions of muslims in the last two decades? Is decades of blockade on Cuba reasonable? Or our alliance with Saudi Arabia and active contribution to their genocide, over our petroleum concerns? Is it reasonable that people may be bankrupted through no fault of their own, by medical emergency? Or again, that the guy who picks your abundant avocados is not granted his own? That our wealthy buy their politicians? That our planet is being sacrified for fleeting monetary gains? None of this is reason. The obligation is not to law, our obligation must be to break and reshape law in service of a genuine human interest.

>someone's identity (like class)

Class is not an identity. You belong to class regardless of how you think of yourself. The proletarian, working class interest is uniquely singled out because workers actually constitute the majority of global humanity, and is thus the best class interest to serve as a ruling class, as self rule of the class ruling itself.

That's descriptive, the social contract is normative.

And the world as it is, determines the norms we wish to transform it by. That is what I am trying to say to you, again and again.