Traffic Regulations and Food Preferences of Wild Animals

[Boojatta]

You may be wondering what (if anything) could connect those two topics. Be patient.

You might have heard food preferences of human beings used as a definitive example of subjectivity. When we consider, instead of human beings, wild animals in their natural environment (as opposed to pets or zoo animals), does the example completely fail?

I suspect that even for wild animals there will be at least some subjectivity when it comes to food preferences. However, there are obviously some non-subjective aspects to the matter. Some substances, if eaten, will kill. Some substances, if eaten, will make an animal vomit. (In effect, the animal's digestive system vetoes the animal's behavioral food choice). There's also an issue that is subjective only in the sense that it varies with the time and the animal: at any given time, an animal may be deficient in some important substances (such as mineral salts). In other words, food preferences have something to do with nutrition and physiology. Nutritional and physiological realities impose undeniable, non-subjective constraints.

Some people claim that ethics is subjective. Let's assume that there's some connection between ethics and law. If we're talking about legal regulations governing vehicular traffic, then even if the regulations are completely arbitrary, there is still an issue of ethics. Those who are licensed to drive have agreed
to obey the regulations.

Presumably no real jurisdiction has traffic regulations that were invented by randomly generating sequences of words until something that looked like a traffic regulation was obtained. Traffic regulations are conceived by people before any political or bureaucratic process turns those conceptions into enacted legislation. Maybe there's an analogy with computer programming. Randomly generating sequences of instructions and then testing the result would be an incredibly inefficient way to write computer programs. Given some requirements, there may be more than one high level approach to writing a program that fulfills the requirements. However, can we conclude that computer programming is subjective? If we can't, then maybe we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that ethics and law are subjective.

[Boojatta]

1. A thought experiment

Suppose that a committee is playing one side of a game of chess. Suppose that the members of the committee have been carefully chosen so that they all have roughly equally levels of chess skill/knowledge. Suppose that the opposition individual or opposition committee cannot hear the deliberations. If a possible move or other issue is to be proposed for consideration by the committee, then some member of the committee will have to bring it to the attention of the committee. The committee will have to decide whether or not to accept a proposed move for further consideration and, given some proposed moves, eventually select one of them as the move to be made by the committee.

The only way that the committee influences the opposition is by the choice of moves actually made by the committee and, perhaps, by the choice of how much time to spend on a given move.

There is no obvious way to rate the quality of any given decision. Given the situation at a given time, should the committee have asked members to keep looking for possible moves to make? Given the arguments proposed in favor of each of two different moves that were both being considered at a given stage in the game, was there enough information to choose one of them or should more time have been allocated to study them?

There is an indisputable outcome: win, lose, or draw. The committee might make a variety of decisions during deliberations, but the only decisions that directly affect the outcome are the decisions of what moves to make and when to make them. Can anyone deny that it must be possible to meaningfully speak of the quality of a decision to make a given move at a given time? However, there is no obvious way to objectively rate one move in isolation from an entire game.

Also note that chess is a human construct, but there is nothing subjective about the rules. It was constructed in the sense that, within the "space" of all possible games, one "point" or game was chosen and assigned the name "chess."

(Edited to correct a typographical error)

[Az]

2. You are dangerously close to the illusion of freewill argument

We do not actually choose what foods we like. We discover what foods we like. It is not a matter of choice. Choice would be on whether we decide to eat a particular food or not. Our taste would be data informing our descision making process.