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orthonormal comments on The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It - Less Wrong
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I agree with most of these excerpts, but I'd like to see evidence for the claim that Western culture is the main cause of our tendency to rationalize post hoc arguments for our moral intuitions. I suspect that much of it is an innate human tendency, and that Western culture just mediates which rationalizations are considered persuasive to others.
If they ran some version of the incest thought experiment in non-Western societies, that is, I predict you could get the same 'moral dumbfounding' effect; you'd just have to construct the scenario in a way that negates that culture's standard rationalizations.
Agree and furthermore suggest that this goes beyond morality itself: people make fast perceptual judgments that proceed directly from salient features to categories to inferred characteristics. Brother-sister love -> "incest" -> "wrong" in the same way that human shape -> "human" -> "mortal". The moral judgment is just one more inferred characteristic from the central category.