[From Richard Kennaway (2006.08.23.0814 BST)]
[From Bill Powers (2006.08.18.19.55 MDT)]
Probably the biggest difference I have with Friedman,. and perhaps with you, is that I don't need any external justification for my way of dealing with morality. I'm as capable of understanding the problems as anyone is, and I know I can't transmit my experience directly to anyone else: everyone has to get there alone. I don't need an external authority to back me up, or permission from anyone, to think as I do. Nor can I appeal to external authority -- not even the authority of logic -- to make people agree with me. I have no authority over anyone.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
Richard Kennaway (2006.08.18.1603 BST) --
So he argues, for example, that a hunter lost in the woods who must find shelter or die, and breaks into an unoccupied hut, should not be penalised, beyond compensating the owner after the fact.
Why "should" he even do that? As soon as you talk about "should," you're objectifying again.
I forget if he actually uses the word "should" in that example. Quite possibly not. All that he is saying, though, is that when considering that situation people generally do prefer that the hunter survive, despite the cost to the hut-owner. There is no appeal to shoulds to prove that this is the right way to deal with such a situation, nor an attempt to set up some other principle instead (Friedman is not a utilitarian), only the observation that people generally do prefer that the situation be handled in that way (and the observation that legal systems usually recognise this).
The raw data from which we can eventually arrive at agreement about the moral world is our moral sensations.
I guess I must be one of those psychopaths, then, because I don't have any moral sensations. I certainly have opinions and strong preferences about moral principles, and I would like to get others to adopt similar ones, but I don't have any sensors that detect morality in the world around me.
That's ok, some people don't know that they're control systems, but they go on being control systems anyway. 
These moral sensations are the perceptions of "right" and "wrong" that we have in particular situations (or when contemplating hypothetical ones, such as the hunter in the woods). Not the general moral principles that we may assert, but the moral sensations themselves. The existence of these is as ineluctable as our sensations of heat and cold, light and dark.
Darn, I've packed my dictionary and I've forgotten what ineluctable means,
"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
(Ok, that's a bit over the top, more like the experience of being possessed by a god than to having moral intuitions, but I couldn't resist the quotation. From "The Terminator", in case you haven't seen it.)
but somehow, I don't think that if a sensation of heat is ineluctable, a sense of moral value is the same. For one thing, I'm pretty sure that perception of moral qualities occurs at a considerably higher level in the brain than perception of heat.
It has just occurred to me that you might be pulling my leg. But no, you wouldn't do that. Would you?
Remember, this isn't my view I'm expounding, but Friedman's, as I understand it. It may have been transformed by its passage through my head. In fact, Bjorn Simonsen has just pointed out that I have stated it a good deal more forcefully that Friedman himself does. It has been a sketch of where I see him pointing rather than where he actually stands.
-- Richard
ยทยทยท
--
Richard Kennaway, jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk, Richard Kennaway
School of Computing Sciences,
University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.