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conchis 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.
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.