Douglas_Knight comments on Strong moral realism, meta-ethics and pseudo-questions. - Less Wrong

18 [deleted] 31 January 2010 08:20PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 02 February 2010 05:59:09AM *  6 points [-]

But how should one choose between morality and babyeating?

Channeling my inner Eliezer, the answer is obviously that you should choose morality (since "should" is just "morality" as a verb).

Now, instead of a moral anti-realist, I'm a moral realist, a babyeating realist, and normative judgement anti-realist.

No, because normative judgement = morality.

This is almost starting to make sense, except... Suppose I say this to a babyeater: "We should sign a treaty banning the development and use of antimatter weapons." What could that possibly mean? Or if one murderer says to another "We should dump the body in the river." he is simply stating a factual falsehood?

I wonder if this is a good summary of our disagreement with Eliezer:

  1. His proposed definitions of "morality" and especially "should" and "ought" are objectionable. They are just not what we mean when we use those words.
  2. He classifies his metaethics as realism whereas we would classify it as anti-realism.

Out of these two, 1 is clearly both a bigger problem and where Eliezer is more obviously wrong. I really don't understand why he sticks to his position there.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 02 February 2010 08:52:02AM 1 point [-]

He characterizes his metaethics as realism whereas we would characterize it as anti-realism.

Where does he characterize it as realism? When he chooses the word, he always chooses "cognitivism"; if someone else says "realism," he doesn't object, but he makes sure to define it to match cognitivism and indicates that there other notions of realism that he doesn't endorse.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 02 February 2010 10:59:29AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for pointing out the error. I changed it to "classify".