Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Wei_Dai 30 January 2010 02:50AM

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Comment author: Toby_Ord 30 January 2010 11:45:41AM 16 points [-]

There are a lot of posts here that presuppose some combination of moral anti-realism and value complexity. These views go together well: if value is not fundamental, but dependent on characteristics of humans, then it can derive complexity from this and not suffer due to Occam's Razor.

There are another pair of views that go together well: moral realism and value simplicity. Many posts here strongly dismiss these views, effectively allocating near-zero probability to them. I want to point out that this is a case of non-experts being very much at odds with expert opinion and being clearly overconfident. In the Phil Papers survey for example, 56.3% of philosophers lean towards or believe realism, while only 27.7% lean towards or accept anti-realism.

http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

Given this, and given comments from people like me in the intersection of the philosophical and LW communities who can point out that it isn't a case of stupid philosophers supporting realism and all the really smart ones supporting anti-realism, there is no way that the LW community should have anything like the confidence that it does on this point.

Moreover, I should point out that most of the realists lean towards naturalism, which allows a form of realism that is very different to the one that Eliezer critiques. I should also add that within philosophy, the trend is probably not towards anti-realism, but towards realism. The high tide of anti-realism was probably in the middle of the 20th Century, and since then it has lost its shiny newness and people have come up with good arguments against it (which are never discussed here...).

Even for experts in meta-ethics, I can't see how their confidence can get outside the 30%-70% range given the expert disagreement. For non-experts, I really can't see how one could even get to 50% confidence in anti-realism, much less the kind of 98% confidence that is typically expressed here.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 January 2010 07:24:22PM 12 points [-]

I am a moral cognitivist. Statements like "ceteris paribus, happiness is a good thing" have truth-values. Such moral statements simply are not compelling or even interesting enough to compute the truth-value of to the vast majority of agents, even those which maximize coherent utility functions using Bayesian belief updating (that is, rational agents) or approximately rational agents.

AFAICT the closest official term for what I am is "analytic descriptivist", though I believe I can offer a better defense of analytic descriptivism than what I've read so far.

EDIT: Looking up moral naturalism shows that Frank Jackson's analytic descriptivism aka moral functionalism is listed as a form of moral naturalism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/#JacMorFun

Note similarity to "Joy in the Merely Good".

Comment author: lukeprog 06 April 2012 11:34:38PM *  3 points [-]

For the interested: A good summary/defense of Jackson's moral functionalism can be found in Jackson (2012), "On ethical naturalism and the philosophy of language."

Now, should we call this a form of "moral realism"? I dunno. That's something I'd prefer to taboo. Even famous error theorist Richard Joyce kinda agrees.