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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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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.
Yes, it explains quite well how our sense that we have good reasons for believing the earth is round could be an illusion.
Hey, don't feel bad, I found some brick marks on my forehead too.
One last shot:
Um, well, yes. It does explain how that could be the case. And if we had independent reasons to think that statements about the earth being round had no truth value, then it would seem to be a reasonable explanation of how the misperception actually arose.
We don't have such independent reasons in the round earth case; but Greene argues elsewhere that we do have such reasons in the case of moral judgments.
Your second sentence doesn't follow. If people cling to a belief even after you've "rationally" "defeated" all their reasons for believing it, that is evidence for the believe being based on gut instinct, and evidence for our sense of having good reasons believing it illusory. It doesn't matter that you can find "objective" evidence afterward; that subject's belief, is gut instinct.
So everything is gut instinct, which thus sheds no light on the particular beliefs Greene is criticizing.
Or, you know, you could just go with the simple hypothesis Greene completely ignored, despite familiarity with Haidt, that it's a silly setup designed to catch people unprepared.
I don't understand your argument. Nor does it seem to me that you understand mine. It's rather a shame that we appear to have wasted this much space utterly failing to communicate with each other, but at this point I doubt there's much to be gained by wasting any more.