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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.
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".