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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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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".