= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
thomblake comments on The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (113)
Minor point: I find Julie-and-Mark-like examples silly because they ask for a moral intuition about a case where the outcome is predefined. Our moral intuition makes arguments of the form "behavior X usually leads to a bad outcome, therefore X is wrong". So if the outcome is already specified, the intuition has nothing to say; nor would we expect it to, since the whole point of morality is to help you make decisions between live possibilities, so why should it have anything to say about a situation that has already happened/cannot be altered?
Or to put it another way, I'm surprised no one said something to the effect of "Julie and Mark shouldn't have had sex because at the time they did they had no way of knowing that it would turn out well, and in fact every reason to believe it would turn out very badly, based on the experiences of other incestuous siblings."
Agreed. Morality is for determining what one has most reason to do or want. Clearly asking after the fact "did they do the wrong thing?" doesn't mesh well with what morality is for. But the finger-wagging sorts of moralists might not agree.
True, although finger-waggers do say things like "Well sure, it might have turned out okay this time. But that doesn't mean it was a good idea."
Who says what morality is for? People have moral instincts which are used, often than not, to evaluate already finished actions on good-bad scale. People engaged in actions evaluated as wrong tend to be labeled as bad people in consequence. We encounter this use of morality every day. Maybe you claim that morality should be used differently, but that's your (meta-)moral judgement (prescriptive statement), while the original post and the thesis it refered to were descriptive about morality (and I think accurate).