komponisto 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: blacktrance 29 May 2014 06:44:43PM 0 points [-]

Saying it's true-for-me-but-not-for-you conflates two very different things: truth being agent-relative and descriptive statements about agents being true or false depending on the agent they're referring to. "X is 6 feet tall" is true when X is someone who's 6 feet tall and false when X is someone who's 4 feet tall, and in neither case is it subjective, even though the truth-value depends on who X is. Morality is similar - "X is the right thing for TheAncientGeek to do" is an objectively true (or false) statement, regardless of who's evaluating you. Encountering "X is the right thing to do if you're Person A and the wrong thing to do if you're Person B" and thinking moralitry subjective is the same sort of mistake as if you encountered the statement "Person A is 6 feet tall and Person B is not 6 feet tall" and concluded that height is subjective.

Comment author: komponisto 29 May 2014 07:10:41PM *  0 points [-]

Morality is similar - "X is the right thing for TheAncientGeek to do" is an objectively true (or false) statement, regardless of who's evaluating you.

Not so! Rather, "X is the right thing for TheAncientGeek to do given TheAncientGeek's values" is an objectively true (or false) statement. But "X is the right thing for TheAncientGeek to do" tout court is not; it depends on a specific value system being implicitly understood.

Comment author: blacktrance 29 May 2014 08:30:50PM *  0 points [-]

"X is the right thing for TheAncientGeek to do" is synonymous with "X is the right thing for TheAncientGeek to do according to his (reflectively consistent) values". You may not want him to act in accordance with his values, but that doesn't change the fact that he should - much like in the standard analysis of the prisoner's dilemma, each prisoner wants the other to cooperate, but has to admit that each of them should defect.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 29 May 2014 07:26:26PM -1 points [-]

Same mistake, Only actions that affect others are morally relevant, from which it follows that rightness cannot be evaluated from one person's values alone.

Maximizing ones values solipsitically is hedonism, not morality.

Comment author: komponisto 29 May 2014 07:28:54PM 0 points [-]

Notice I didn't use the term "morality" in the grandparent. Cf. my other comment.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 29 May 2014 08:24:06PM 0 points [-]

But the umpteenth grandparent was explicitly about morality.