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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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Comments (113)
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.