Rabbi Dr. David Gottlieb - Jewish Philosophy: Objective Morality - Part 1

so i have been told that there's some interest in objective morality whether morality is objective or not so i'm interested in discussing that subject so if that is of interest to you i'm happy to talk about that for a while and then after that we can see where we'll go yeah okay i want to make a suggestion to you about how to conduct critical discussions um now i don't know your legal system in american legal system there's something called the burden of proof let's say someone's accused of a crime the the job of the prosecutor is to present an argument that he committed the crime in american law the argument has to be convincing beyond a reasonable doubt then there's a defense attorney who's defending the the the accused what's his job his job is not to show that he's innocent his job is just to show that the prosecutor hasn't succeeded in american terms it means the job of the defense attorney is to raise a reasonable doubt if the prosecutor is successful we know he's guilty if the defense attorney's successful we don't know anything we just know that he hasn't been proved guilty he might be guilty he just hasn't been proved we don't know that he's innocent the prosecutor has to settle it the defense attorney just has to move us back into doubt now imagine two people discussing any issue there are three ways you can do it or two you can have one person bear the burden of proof and while he's bearing the burden of proof the other guy is just trying to show he hasn't succeeded in bearing the burden of proof the reasons that he has given don't amount to an adequate proof then you can go to the other guy and let him bear the burden of proof you could also conduct a discussion in which both sides bear the burden of proof simultaneously i recommend you don't do that i recommend you don't do that because certain types of fallacious arguments or switches which i'll illustrate for you are prevented if you don't do that start putting the burden of proof on one and see if he can bear it if he can bear it he wins and we know he's right if he can't bear it we only know that he didn't win he might be right if he doesn't bear the burden of proof where we started that is to say we don't know what's correct then we go to the other guy and say you'll try to bear the bird roof and see whether you can do it if he fails also then we're where we started we don't know what's correct if he succeeds then we know that he's right the reason why i suggest doing it this way is because when a person tries to establish his position and he goes through his arguments one by one he goes through his evidence one by one and they start getting knocked down this isn't right this isn't right and this isn't right there's a great temptation for him to say well if you think you're right you prove it that's a fallacy that's a fallacy that's his avoiding his burden of proof i'm i recommend never letting that happen so listen we were talking about the other guy we weren't talking about the other guy we're asking whether you could bear the burden of proof it doesn't help you if he fails you can both fail the fact that he fails doesn't make you right so um by the way i learned this from socrates socrates used to discuss things with his contemporary and its greeks and sometimes they took very strong positions and he used to say wow i mean one guy was going to prosecute his father for murder why because his father punished a slave who had done something wrong tied him up and said i'll be back in a few hours and got delayed by the time he came back he was dead so he is the son prosecuting his father for murders the secretary says to him wow your father for murder you must know what justice is you must know what goodness is you must know what responsibility for parents is because after all you're prosecuting your father and he says sure i know no problem now socrates attitude is me i don't know anything i lend it from mars i'm totally but you say you know well let's see if you know and then he interviews him and slices his arguments into pieces at the end of which he says okay nice talking to socrates i'm going up to court to prosecute my father forget about the discussion he's going off to do it anyway but that's the way i think the discussion should be conducted one side bears the bird the proof and the other side for the time takes the position of a know-nothing i don't know anything but you say you know let's hear how you're going to establish your position so if we're going to talk about whether morality is objective or not i want to start with the person who's against objectivity the person who's sure it's not objective he knows it's relative or it's nihilistic or the various different types of objections to rejections of objectivity let's see if he can bear the burden of proof let's see if he can give us good reason to think morality is not objective if he can the story is over if he can't then at least we'll have to admit we don't know that it's not objective we don't know maybe it is maybe it isn't and then we can consider the reasons that could be given to see this objective so this is the first step this unbalanced stab i'm putting the burden of proof on the one who says morality is not objective now i'm going to run through i'll run through the arguments that i know in favor of morality not being objective if i've let some out that you're aware of we should definitely discuss them so we'll do a complete job yeah would you also suggest though that the person who succeeds in an argument may not necessarily be correct due to the other side not having a sufficient argument in other words just because one person wins so to speak does not actually necessarily mean they're actually correct oh yes right but it should mean usually that one should accept his opinion for the time keeping an open mind that new opinions might come up or new or new arguments might come up but in the meantime if he has the the the majority of adequate reason then that's the opinion we're not to adopt until then unless something goes wrong yes we're talking now about what it's appropriate to adopt we're not talking about ultimately what's perfectly true you know what's what's absolutely true that's that's very important very important observation okay the first argument that the enemies of objectivity use is the fact that different societies different cultures have different moral rules different moral principles i'm just going to skip over a possible critique maybe they don't have different wall principles i'm just telling you there is such a good thing i'm going to skip over it because i'm more interested in the direct logic okay okay different cultures have different moral principles and therefore what therefore because different cultures have different moral principles none of them is objectively correct golly that sounds a little loose to me um there was a time when some cultures thought the earth was flat and some cultures thought the earth was round would anybody say well cultures difference to the s the shape of the earth so the earth doesn't have a real shape or whether the earth's in motion i mean why would the fact that cultures disagree about something mean there's no right or wrong about that thing there's no correct or incorrect there's no true or false about that thing surely that's a little quick cultures can disagree just because of ignorance just because it hasn't been investigated enough because the right discoveries haven't been made the fact that cultures disagree isn't the reason to think there's no right or wrong about the issue so then people push this a little harder okay okay it's not just mere disagreement look they've been talking about this for a long time 2500 years at least and then i'm making progress surely if people are talking about it for 2500 years they're not making progress then there can't be anything there there just can't be anything of substance there and you can push this even further not only have people been talking for 2500 years they haven't made progress but people can't even agree on what the right method is what kind of investigation should we do maybe their investigation is too difficult to do but they don't even agree on what kind of investigation is is to be done surely a subject where they've been discussing it for a long time and there's no progress in agreement and they can't agree on what method is is appropriate surely there's just nothing there there's nothing objective there to talk about well um let's consider some parallels how about what makes the stars shine up until 20th century nobody had a clue there were ideas but nobody had a clue the idea i liked best one of the ideas you find the ancient greeks is that the night sky is a piece of black velvet and behind that piece of black velvet there's a sea of light and there are holes in the velvet and the stars you see are the light coming through the holes that was one theory not only did nobody have an agreement as to what makes the star shine nobody had a clue what to do about it no one had an agreed upon method to investigate it and come up with an answer should they have said there's no reason why they shine there's no reality as to why they shine there's no truth about why they shine surely that would have been premature we think we know why they tried they shine because of nuclear fusion let's take alchemy alchemy was the attempt to turn base metals into gold and to find the elixir of life everlasting life alchemists did experiments for hundreds of years they did experiments and they recorded them and they corresponded with one another they just they just couldn't come to any agreement the alchemist in berlin would write to the alchemist in paris take this solution and take this metal and uh boil it up and of course it has to be at midnight and the third thursday of the month and you have to wear the conical black hat and you have to recite the incantation and you have to do it with your eyes closed for 14 minutes do that and you'll get purple gunk and the guy in in paris doesn't he says i don't know i did the whole thing and i didn't get any purple gunk oh was the conical black hat six feet tall or only five feet tall five feet tall you did it wrong you did it wrong do it again do it again with six feet tall you recited the the the magic words in latin or in french french ah that's ridiculous do it again of course that didn't bring any unanimity about the results they didn't talk about what water was used swamp water fresh water salt water they didn't talk about the material of a pot was the pot ceramic it was a pot metal or something else they didn't talk about the time of the year it's cold outside moist outside all that they didn't take into account they didn't know what the right variables are they had a lot of wrong variables they didn't pay attention to the right variables it took hundreds of years chemistry was born out of outcoming after a while they began to reel that they can't realize the chemical hat doesn't matter and the incantation doesn't matter and the material the pot does matter and what kind of water it is does matter and when they finally came to see what the correct variables what they got reproducible results should anyone have said 150 years into the exercise look they've been doing it for 150 years now they can't agree on the results they can't agree on the method so there's nothing there no as a matter of fact there was something there they just didn't get it right they were getting it desperately wrong as one philosopher said maybe our problems with with morality are because we haven't had our newton yet isaac newton organized certain aspects of physical science and created a method which is used until this day we haven't had our newton we're just in confusion i'll give you a modern example psychology what is psychology about how does it work what's it for how is it tested there are at least three entirely different pictures of what psychology is about behaviorism says psychology is about behavior behavior that you can observe with your eyes you see the person's as animal psychology also you see it moving around you want to explain why it moves around the way it does another group says psychology is about the brain okay you can't see the brain so you watch behavior to infer things about the brain we can look inside the brain and just see that it's a gigantic mystery we're doing the best we can another says psychology is about the psyche whatever that is and when you talk to people and you access the psyche by conversation you can make changes you can understand where they came from and stuff and so on these are three very different pictures of what psychology is there's a fellow who wrote a book daniel did it called psychology consciousness explained the reviewer in the journal philosophy said a better title for the book would have been consciousness ignored because in 350 pages he didn't discuss the topic that shows you there are radically different pictures of what's going on here now since there's such radical disagreement about psychology should one say well there just isn't any truth about psychology there's nothing right or wrong about it nothing real about it because there's such radical disagreement about it don't think that's right i think psychology hasn't had its newton either we all know stuff is going on we just don't have the right tools to investigate it to draw reliable conclusions about it so this first move that um morality isn't objective it isn't objective because there is disagreement it's long-standing persistent disagreement and we don't have an agreed upon method for sovereignty disagreement that doesn't settle it that doesn't teach me that morality has to be non-objective just doesn't work yeah i never directly related i think there's something which perhaps people confused with an objective reality journey intuitive reality well we'll come to that we'll come to that that's on the positive side that's the problem just now assessing arguments on the negative side yeah i wanted to go back to one of the early points you mentioned about cultures differing on ideas of morality surely to take into account the idea that some cultures differ on ideas of morality it's not the same thing as for example disagreeing that the world is flat because it's a lot easier for people today to again if you want to use technical philosophy philosophical terms to infer that the earth is flat or round than it is for somebody to say the death penalty is wrong and here's the tangible proof of that i agree with you i agree with you but it's not speaking to the point that was being made i'm considering an argument that someone presents an argument says here are my premises and here's the conclusion the premises are supposed to deliver the conclusion the premise was there's disagreement and the conclusion is there's nothing real now you're saying look he needs another premise he needs a premise that it's not about the physical world maybe so let him revise his argument and let him present his argument again and i'll see what the argument will do but his argument was disagreement means there's nothing real well then i point out that physical matters are a counter example to that okay if he wants to revise it and say something else which they don't but you could suggest it then then we could we could try it again and say disagreeing about things that aren't physical means there's nothing real of course now i want to know why is the disagreement so important if disagreement can be settled for things that are physical then maybe disagreement can be settled for things that aren't physical it isn't the disagreement alone that does it it's disagreed about things that aren't physical okay but once you recognize the physical can settle this agreement so then i think you owe me more explanation as to why you think this particular item can't be settled because there's this agreement by some other feature that could settle it if you had a blanket position and it's and it could be sustained then you'd have an argument but if you say to me it works when it works and it doesn't work or it doesn't work then that doesn't sound like an argument that i have to take so seriously um and if let's push your point another way someone will say well look physical things are settlable and things that aren't physical aren't settled let's take it out and morality isn't a matter of a physical thing so that's my argument things that aren't they aren't settled at all without disagreement even if everybody agreed to say somebody could disagree tomorrow just it just doesn't settle against this many contemporary philosophers suggest that you think about math about arithmetic seven plus five is twelve said emanuel kant said five is twelve what's that that's not physical 7 plus 5 is 12 is not physical let me show you it's not physical there are people who think maybe it is john stuart mill said that it is it's just that everybody else left him out of the room and he was a great philosopher say seven plus five is twelve look i take seven things i take five things put them together and i count and there's 12. that's how i learned seven plus five is twelve it's just that's the way the physical world works sort of like gravity you know things fall down because i watch them and see them falling down oh i forgot i'm thinking i'm going to four o'clock okay we'll have to pick this up tomorrow because you