= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Wei_Dai comments on Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome - 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 (198)
Among target faculty listing meta-ethics as their area of study moral realism's lead is much smaller: 42.5% for moral realism and 38.2% against.
Looking further through the philpapers data, a big chunk of the belief in moral realism seems to be coupled with theism, where anti-realism is coupled with atheism and knowledge of science. The more a field is taught at Catholic or other religious colleges (medieval philosophy, bread-and-butter courses like epistemology and logic) the more moral realism, while philosophers of science go the other way. Philosophers of religion are 87% moral realist, while philosophers of biology are 55% anti-realist.
In general, only 61% of respondents "accept" rather than lean towards atheism, and a quarter don't even lean towards atheism. Among meta-ethics specialists, 70% accept atheism, indicating that atheism and subject knowledge both predict moral anti-realism. If we restricted ourselves to the 70% of meta-ethics specialists who also accept atheism I would bet at at least 3:1 odds that moral anti-realism comes out on top.
Since the Philpapers team will be publishing correlations between questions, such a bet should be susceptible to objective adjudication within a reasonable period of time.
A similar pattern shows up for physicalism.
In general, those interquestion correlations should help pinpoint any correct contrarian cluster.
This is why I put more weight on Toby's personal position, than on the majority expert position. As far as I know, Toby is in the same contrarian cluster as me, yet he seems to give much more weight to moral realism (and presumably not the Yudkowskian kind either) than I do. Like ciphergoth, I wish he would tell us which arguments in favor of realism, or against anti-realism, that he finds persuasive.
It seems that would be more likely if some people would put effort into apparently wanting to learn more about moral realism, or would read and present some of the arguments charitably to LW.