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SilasBarta comments on The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It - Less Wrong
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Ugh. Where to start...
Yes, because evolution gave us the instincts that solved the prisoner's dilemma and made social life possible. Which is why Jonathan Haidt finds it more helpful to define morality as, rather than being about harm and fairness, something like:
Green is basically screaming bloody murder at how people stupidly conclude that incest is wrong in a case where some bad attributes of incest don't apply, and how this is part of a more general flaw involving people doing an end-run around the usual need to find rational reasons for their moral judgments.
His view is in complete ignorance of recent ground-breaking research on the nature of human morality (see above link). Basically, most secular academics think of morality only in terms of harms and fairness, but, worldwide, people judge morality on three other dimensions as well: ingroup/loyalty (do we maintain a cohesive group?), authority/respect, and purity/sancity (the last one being the intuition challenged by Greene's example).
While political discourse in the West has focused on harm and fairness, human nature in general is judging from all five. This narrow focus has resulted in Westerners, not surprisingly, being unable to justify from the three others unless they come from a ... religious background!
Or, more succinctly, morality is a meme that enables solutions to the prisoner's dilemma. All five dimensions, to some extent, work toward that end.
What Greene has discovered is better described as "Westerners do not have the educational background to justify and express their moral intuitions that go beyond harm and fairness." Congratulations: when you force people to talk about morality purely in terms of harms, you can get them to voice moral opinions they can't justify.
Had the participants gotten such grounding, they could have answered the incest dilemma like this:
"As stipulated, there is no harm from what the siblings did. However, that's just disgusting [sanctity], and is disruptive to the social order [authority]. Within your artificial scenario, you have assumed these difficulties away. If I and others did not find such acts disgusting, they would inevitably become more common, and social life would break down: first, from genetic disease, and second, from destabilized family units, where parents are forced to take sides between their own kids. Over time, this hurts society's ability to solve the prisoner's dilemma."
The fact that people cannot connect their moral intuitions to the evolutionary/historical reason that such intuitions evolved is not a reason to come to the conclusion Greene does.
I should also add that it starts off with a very questionable claim:
If you're correctly paraphrasing Greene, this is misleading at best. Yes, those statements are syntactically similar, but most people are capable of recognizing when a statement starts to make a moral claim (or, upon further questioning, some concept they hold that is isomorphic to morality). They recognize that when you get into talk about something being "just as bad" as something else, you're talking about morality.
It's like saying, hey, "Jews are murderworthy" sounds rather like "apples are red", OBVIOUSLY we are ill-equipped to discuss morality!
FWIW, I don't even necessarily disagree with Greene that people approach morality from a flawed framework. But his arguments aren't very good, they ignore the literature, and don't present the right framework. Thumbs down.
Greene and Haidt have coauthored papers together, so I would guess they are aware of each other's work!
It doesn't need to be analyzed exclusively that way; it's just one reason it's there, a sort of focal point. "Eww! That guy eats snakes, he's not like us [which will make it harder to punish him for defection]" Even if the reason for a tradition changes, it can still serve as a focal point to identify ingroup/outgroup.
It wasn't my point, I was just parroting someone else I read on the matter.
In any case, I wasn't endorsing the response I gave to the incest case. I was just showing what a response would look like from someone who was actually prepared. When people aren't prepared for a question -- i.e. the 99% of the population that doesn't deeply reflect on their aversion to incest -- yes, they'll defend a position despite lack of a justification. But guess what: you'll get the same thing if you ask people to justify their belief that the earth is round.
Greene reads too much into this failure to offer a justification for unusual dilemmas.
Again, I ask that you look at this from the perspective of an actual participant in the survey. That person is imagining grabbing a random person and tossing them off a bridge on very short notice. Numerous factors come into play, and the participant is going to consider them whether or not you assure them that they don't matter.
Anyway, there are separate questions here:
1) Why did evolution equip us not to push someone off a bridge ...? Because overt murder is a bad strategy, and the benefit isn't tangible enough to outweigh it.
2) Why do people, on sober reflection of the issues, still consider it unethical to push the fat guy off the bridge? That's easy. For one thing, people on a trolly consented to the risk of a crash in a way that someone standing on a bridge did not consent to some psycho f--- suddenly deciding to push him off out of some bizarre sense of heroism. They also intuitively see such an extreme action as violating norms, which makes future actions harder to plan ("let's take the long way around the bridge"). Etc. There are many reasons to distinguish the alternatives that the "clever" people who design the surveys aren't taking into account.
Another reason the trolley problem is bogus is that if you were really in such a situation, you wouldn't be sure your attempt to push the guy onto the track would even succeed. What if he saw you coming and resisted? Pushing a lever with 100% of success is different from pushing a guy with 87% estimated success and consequences if you fail.
Yes, I think this is a serious problem. All the ways I can think of to give you a very high chance of shoving the guy off mean that you don't have to actually touch him, just (say) cut a rope, and that wouldn't just make it more likely you'd succeed but introduce a counfounding effect of making it slightly less personal for you.
This is in part because I don't really believe the explanation for non-shoving that says it has to do with not using people to an end; I think it's just squeamishness about shoving someone with your own hands who was right next to you. If you were dropping them onto the tracks from a great distance by pulling a lever, I think people would pull the lever a lot more often. I haven't tested this, of course.
Well if you fine-tune the conditions of a hypothetical dilemma too much, people will tend to go with a useful heuristic: they will call bullshit.
You seem to be confusing Greene's argument with Roko's gloss on Greene's argument (which is not to say your criticisms aren't valid, they're just not criticisms of Greene.)
AFAICT, the quoted passages from Greene aren't intended (by Greene) to defend the notion "that moral propositions have no rational justification." His argument for that proposition (i.e. his argument against moral realism) spans the 90-odd pages prior to the parts Roko excerpted here, and seems independent of anything Haidt has to say about moral psychology.
What the excerpted parts are trying to do is something else entirely: viz. explain how we could think moral propositions have rational justifications, even though they don't (because moral realism is false).
It looked to me like Greene's focus on the dilemma responses was, "Look how people waive the requirement for judgments to have justification when it comes to moral issues" and that's how I addressed it. I do not believe the participants were issuing waivers for their moral beliefs; rather, the question's phrasing, combined with the surrounding culture, artificially constrain what counts as a valid response to the question. Not having been prepared to trace the source of such rarely-pondered questions so that they can dig out of hole they've been placed in, the participants stick to a position they find they can't justify.
Not so impressive, I think, when you look at it that way.
Funny, that's not what I took to be the point at all, and I don't think that the case Greene is actually trying to make would be at all affected by your criticisms. He's simply saying that:
Maybe you have some objection to this, but to me it seems fairly reasonable, and consistent with evidence about how we reason in a variety of other contexts.
Yes, and to prove this, he looks specifically at dilemmas people are presented with in which he can beat the argument he knows they're going to use, presumably to show that people aren't reasoning.
My response, then, is that all the experiments show is participant under-preparedness. As I pointed out before, if someone were more well-versed in evolutionary psychology and understood the root of such intuitions, they could give a better defense.
But if I don't spend my days in situations where knowledge of the tradeoffs involved in incest is important, then yes, Greene is absolutely right, you can stump me on how I justify my beliefs.
But just the same, if I don't spend my days as a satellite engineer, I won't be able to defend the proposition that the earth is (very nearly) a sphere against an informed devil's advocate, and will nevertheless persist in believing the earth is round.
Does that make my believe in the spherical earth a "gut instinct"? If so, fine. But then that deletes the negative significance Greene attributes to "gut instincts" and shows how the propositions they involve can still have objective truth.
At best, Greene's thesis may be better off if he just scrapped the reference to the dilemma responses.
Sure, but that would still be a rationale generated after the fact, to justify a judgment not initially formed on the basis of those reasons. The point isn't about whether we can come up with convincing reasons, post-hoc. It's that, whether or not we end up finding them convincing, they're still post-hoc. The fact that they don't seem post-hoc internally is what allows us to maintain the illusion that our opinions were based on sound reasons all along.
This point has different implications depending on whether or not you already think moral realism is false (as Greene does). But it's not intended (by Greene) as an argument that moral realism is false. (I feel like I'm repeating this point ad nauseam, but your claim that your spherical earth example "shows [gut instincts] can still have objective truth", still seems to be based on the misapprehension that Greene is using this as an argument against objective moral truth. He's not. He has separate arguments against that. His argument in this part assumes there is no objective moral truth.)
ETA:
I don't want to be a dick about this, but this strikes me as a strong claim, coming from someone who doesn't seem to have bothered to read the whole thesis. I'm not sure that Greene should be held responsible for the fact that you don't seem to get his point, if you haven't actually read most of his argument.
Seriously, the overall point you're making is a good one, but the way you're making it is, IMO, incredibly unfair to Greene. Given that Roko has actually made the argument you seem to be criticizing, I don't really understand why it's Greene who's getting the beat up.
My point about the spherical earth was to show how his examples about "moral reasoning = post hoc rationalization of gut instinct" prove too much. That is, they could just as well show all our beliefs, even about the most mundane things, to be post-hoc rationalizations. So how is moral reasoning any worse off in this respect? You can trick people into looking ad hoc in morals; you can do the same for earth sphericity. It still says more about your setup than some morality-unique phenomenon you've discovered!
And I don't want to be a dick either, but neither has Greene bothered to consider the most basic, disconfirmatory explanations for the responses subjects gave, explanations btw given by Haidt, someone he extensively quotes!
The phenomenon is probably not unique to morals, and Greene doesn't need it to be. I don't see how it would "prove too much" if it were.
What I'm trying to say is that they're only disconfirmatory of a case Greene is not trying to make.
He most certainly does need to be, or else he's just proven that every truth he does accept (or whatever concept isomorphic to truth he's using) is also a post-hoc rationalization of gut instinct, in which case: what's the point? Yes, my belief that "killing babies is wrong" is just some goofy intuition I'm trying to justify after involuntarily believing it ... but so is Greene's entire PhD thesis!
Isn't it cute how he sticks to his thesis even when presented with contradictory evidence?
The point is that it explains how our sense that we have good reasons for things could be an illusion, not that it proves all our intuitions are unjustified.
But I'm just repeating myself now. I think I'm going to stop banging my head against this particular brick wall.
Sorry for the self-reply, but to expand on my point about the difficulty Westerners have talking about certain dimensions of morality, I want to present an illustrative example from a different perspective.
Let's say we're in an alternate world with strong, codified rules about social status and authority, but weak, vague, unspoken norms against harm that nevertheless keep harm at a low level.
Then let's say you present the people of this world with this "dilemma" to make Greene's point:
Then, because of the deficiency in the vocabulary of "harms", you would get responses like:
"Look, I can't explain why, but obviously, it's wrong to torture and kill someone for enjoyment. No disrespect to the President, of course."
"What? I don't get it. Why would the President order a citizen killed? There would be outrage. He'd feel so much guilt that it wouldn't even relieve the stress you claim it does."
"Yeah, I agree the President has authority to do that, but God, it just burns me up to think about someone getting tortured like that for someone else's enjoyment, even if it is our great President."
Would you draw the same conclusion Greene does about these responses?
For the reasons I pointed out here, it still seems to me that you're attacking a straw man here. Greene doesn't conclude from this that morality is not rationally justifiable. He believes that moral realism is false for separate reasons, which are set out at length in Ch. 2 of the dissertation.
AFAICT, the position you're attacking has only been articulated by Roko.
I do not think it is a strawman that, in the alternate world, Greene would get a good laugh at how people cling so tightly to their anti-torture/murder intuitions, even when the President orders it for heaven's sake! How strange that "one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case rather than a judge searching for the truth".
I'm confused. You initially seemed to be criticizing Greene for attempting to conclude, from individuals' responses to the dilemmas, that morality is not justifiable. I pointed out that Greene was not attempting to draw this conclusion from those data. You now say that your original argument is not a strawman because Greene would "get a good laugh" out of your alternative dilemma.
I would imagine that he might get a good laugh from this situation. After all, being an anti-realist he doesn't think there are any good reasons for moral judgments; and he might therefore find any circumstance of moral dumbfounding amusing. But I don't see how that's especially relevant to the argument.
Timeout. I did not claim there was a great principle human morality flows from; I merely think there is more regularity to our intuitions ("godshatter") than you or Greene would lead one to believe, and much of this is accounted for by that fact that instincts must have arisen that permitted social life, cooperation, accumulation of social capital, etc.. But yes, intuitions are going to contradict; I never said or implied otherwise.
Of course. Minimizing total harm is just one factor. So sure, there are cases where people believe that the torture is worse than whatever it is alleged to prevent. This is not the same, of course, as "not valuing reduction of total harm".
Your comment reminds me of epicycles somehow, not sure if I just fail to appreciate this info adequately...