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Does anyone hold that morals are the basis of truth?

21:08 / 03.09.03

I've been thinking about the idea that truth is derived from morals, rather than the other way around. I would like to know any major philosophers hold this, or similar, views. It seems like it would require the belief in objective morals to be anything but radically skeptical. I may post again a little later with some of my thoughts about how this might get started, but, since I’m only starting to consider it, it might be helpful to find someone who has already done the initial work.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

21:28 / 03.09.03

What kind of truth? You need to go into a little more detail. For example, I can think of any number of people who might accept the notion that a moral perspective colours what a given person will be able to take on board or even imagine as a truth, but that's not quite the same as the assertion that truth proceeds from morals.

at the scarwash

21:30 / 03.09.03

Okay, something that confuses me--who holds that morals derive from truth? Whose position are you contraverting? I'd like to know what the arguement is that holds morality and truth/falsehood have anything to do with one another, never mind either one having a generative relationship.

22:00 / 03.09.03

Well roughly, the entire anglo-american ethical philosophical tradition holds that morals derive from truth - that is, that you can generate complex ethical systems through logical application and combination of basic premises.

Pascal held that truth came from love, which might be something like what you're after. You could also make an argument that Nietzsche thought of truth as derived from morals, but he was not too keen on either category.

20:25 / 05.09.03

A v. quick sketch of what I currently figure:

Truth is relative to structure and structures are merely a network of relations. Relations constitute phenomenna and nothing else. It is the structure that creates truth, and thus, it is the structure that creates a moral space that coincides with a given grouping of people's culturla and etc. structure.

Thus, morals, I reckon, are derived from truths about ontology.

00:43 / 06.09.03

There's the phenomenon of people calling information which does not support their views 'biased' and that which does 'objective,' but I'm not sure if that's what you're going for.

05:19 / 06.09.03

Maybe Hume? I haven't read any of his work yet. However, I've been told he believed that you know good and evil by your emotions. In addition, he's often quoted as saying that reason is the slave of the passions (though it is apparently just a footnote in one of his books).

So, if ethics is derived from emotions, and emotions take priority over reason (which you use to find the truth), then David Hume might be who you are looking for.

06:35 / 06.09.03

Doesn't this depend on whether you view morals as a lie or not?

Is philosopher fishing mandatory before a discussion takes place? This is a very interesting subject.

11:14 / 06.09.03

If someone has considered this question in detail sometime in the last three thousand years, and they were kind enough to write it down in a book, we might be able to benefit from their knowledge. So, while it definitely isn't mandatory to look at previous philosophers, it is still a sensible idea.

Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless

18:28 / 06.09.03

There were a group of moral philosophers in the UK and elsewhere in the nineteenth century called the Intuitionists, who believed, contra the Utilitarian position, that what was good was defined by innate moral intuitions, rather than the happiness of people in the world. Not sure what they thought about truth tho'
The now more or less completely forgotten William Whewell was one of the leaders of the Intuitionist group, which was IIRC pro-Church of England and anti-Darwinist. I have no idea what their key texts were, But JS Mill almost certainly rubbishes them somewhere in his voluminous writings.

19:29 / 06.09.03

Dr. ~ (c^2) > 0 is on the right track when it comes to thinking about this question. More specifically, you have to be careful by what you mean by the term "truth". Do you mean the relation between a representational system and the object which it represents (i.e., language) or do you mean "the way the world really is"?

I take it you mean the latter.

One common position that many would categorize as "morality determines truth" is cultural relativism, but that categorizaton is flawed. Cultural relativism states that there is no objective truth. Instead, ruth is derived from culture. That position derives from an observation of how many different cultures disagree on what is true, with that disagreement having roots in culture. This is flawed because it fails to separate belief from truth. Of course, cultures disagree in what they believe and how they evaluate evidence. That's a disagreement about they believe to be true, not what is true. So, these people need a different argument.

Is this the question you are trying to develop, "Does the deep structure of reality derive from morality?"

For anyone who's interested, morality being based on reality is a traditional view which has roots in Aristotle, was picked up by Aquinas and, so, had a huge impact on Christian thought. Roughly, it goes something like this. The world and all of its parts have a purpose (for Christians, this would derive from it being created by God). Morality involves fulfilling that purpose. So, if part of that purposes is praising God, you're immoral if you don't. If the purpose of your wang is to make babies, using it for other activities is immoral.

21:30 / 06.09.03

Errrmm shakily remembering my Philosphy degree, there were a school labelled (after the fact, natch) Logical Positivists, who believed that in the same way that mathematics could be shown to be derived from axioms, then there are certain axiomatic truths which underlied moral judgement. As I recall, as with all thing filersofikal, no-one could come up with a joyful (by which I mean "there's a knock-down argument for you") proof of a single one of the buggers.
I really don't want to get onto Wittgenstein here, because I have no idea what he was on about.
(The whole school gets torched in the late seveties, I believe, when someone pointed out that maths doesn't really rely on axoims. Plus ca change...)

Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless

22:09 / 06.09.03

The Logical Positivists weren't particularly into value judgements- they tended to dismiss that kind of thing as 'metaphysics'
Early Wittgenstein (the Wittgenstein of Tractatus Logico-Philosophus) emphatically did not believe that logic could say anything about ethics, and therefore thought there could be no rigorous and meaningful moral philosophy. The famous quote is:
'Concerning that about which we cannot speak, we must remain silent'
(Tractatus, $7)
I believe AJ Ayer also explains this a little less vatically in Language, Truth and Logic

Concerning the Intuitionists, mentioned above, this encyclopaedia entry on William Whewell suggests that they did actually believe that morals were the basis of truth.

23:08 / 06.09.03

Thanks for the link to Whewell.

I don't think Whewell actually espouses the morality-is-the-basis-for- truth issue SMatthewStolte brought up. Rather Whewell's saying that the moral principles are necessarily true based on the nature of the relevant moral concepts. Just like 1+1=2 is true based on the nature of the mathemtical concepts to which those symbols refer.

The logical positivists who dealt with ethics put forward a view called emotivism. In general, logical positivists claimed that the meaning of language was tied to how you would decide whether a sentence was true or false. This is called verificationism. With moral language, the only evidence you can gather about a term like "wrong" is of people's emotional states when they label an action "wrong." There are no other observations you could make, they claim. So, the sentence "Murder is wrong." collapses to something like "I don't like murder.".

FWIW the positivists would say that Whewell is full of crap because he's saying we have this "magical" sense that allows us to perceive abstract moral objects.

What do you think of SMatthewStolte's idea?

I'm having a hard time even imagining how he could get an argument for that position off the ground.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:06 / 07.09.03

Possibly something Kantian would make sense here - he would suggest perhaps that "truth", insofar as truth can be said to be a thing rather than a property, is subject to similar critical conditions as morality - can the proposition be universalised, is it coherent, that sort of thing. Therefore truth and morality could be said to be different ways of perceiving the same structure of absolute ideas. This is post-Platonic, of course, and Plato might construct an argument that morality, if by morality we mean "the Good" is not just the basis of truth but the basis of the relaity that allows the concept of truth to have meaning...

Idealist philosophies in general are probably a decent place to start...

But I'm not sure I understand the question. Do we mean that what is good is also true, or that what is good defines what can be considered to be true.

15:06 / 07.09.03

I'm not at all clear on what it would mean for truth to be something, itself, rather than a property of something like propostions.

However, I was under the impression the question at issuse was the latter one, the issue of the good defining what is true. In which case I don't think Kant will be a lot of help. It may be the case that Kantian morality is mode of apprehending truths about rational agency & c., but the fact remains that something's being moral is not what _makes_ it true -- the relationship seems to me to go the other way, i.e., facts about human agency, what's rationally consistent, & c. are what make act X moral for Kant. The same seems to me to be true re: Plato -- that is, something's participating in the form of the Good is not (fundmentally or necessarily) what makes it exist or be real, except to the extent that existence itself is seen as a kind of Good -- a kind which can only be trivially considered "moral," I would think. Further, there's a whole range of non-moral propostions whose truth value can't sensibly be said to rely on moral propertied or conditions.

03:31 / 08.09.03

[I'm really pleased with the response to this thread, and the initial post was vague, because the idea in my mind is vague. Consequently, I don't want this post to be considered clarification of my question but as a response---the same thing everybody else is doing]

Whewell’s philosophy sounds incredibly comforting. Thanks.

I would probably think of a kind of pragmatic idealism. Idealism, because underlying everything would be objective morals, and pragmatism because every truth would be seen as a tool to a moral end.

One motivation for the idea might be a strong focus on what ought to be believed, and the idea that, beyond that which ought to be believed, there is no truth. So, morally, we should believe the truth, but this proposition is analytic, because truth is no more than moral belief. If I were going to take that road, I’d have to show two things:
1. That some conception of truth that really expands beyond moral belief doesn’t make any sense. (I think this is one of CaseK's points)
2. That even talking about this stuff is possible without undermining the initial position. For instance, when I say “I believe in objective morals,” isn’t this the same as saying, “I believe that it is true objective morals exist.”

Both of these seem to require a kind of layered vision to both truth and morality, with deeper truths such as the truth of the existence of morality being admitted.

___
I'm curious about Pascal's belief that truth comes from love, because this sounds close to the question in the initial post, but I have never read Pascal.