= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jack comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - 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 (1329)
Looping back to the starting point of this discussion, from which we are in danger of drifting too far, what I wanted to say is that people who take an intolerant position on the subject of (say) homosexuality do not seem to do so after having held up their own ethical intuitions to anything like the kind of scrutiny you and others here are clearly capable of.
Rather, they seem to rationalize an immediate "eww" reaction and look for any ammunition they can find supporting their intution that "people shouldn't do that". That strikes me as irrational. This comment seemed to be saying much the same thing.
My stance, I guess, could be summarized as "Show me someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, or polyamory." That is, consistent reasons, stable under reflection.
I suggest looking up the views of communitarians on these topics. Some names: David Popenoe, Amitai Etzioni. See this book, and especially this part from Popenoe. tl;dr: The won't go as far as the most bigoted but they're also not cool with just affirming homosexuality and out of wedlock promiscuity. Communitarianism isn't my bag of tea but it has pretty firm theoretical foundations and the research that suggests marriage's importance isn't obviously bunk.
As for those who are just rationalizing an "eww" reaction, their mistake isn't basing their terminal values on disgust, their mistake is trying to justify those values in terms liberals, who don't share their intuition, can understand. "Polyamory should be prohibited because polyamory is immoral" is a consistent position. See Jonathan Haidt's page on the foundations of morality. Most people who object to polyamory and homosexuality are coming from the purity/sanctity foundation (i.e. "ewww!"). But there is nothing rationalist or not rationalist about these intuitions. They're just intuitions like all moral reasons. You and I might have more complicated intuitions that can be formalized in interesting ways and employ philosophers-- But I'm with Hume here, you can't reason your way to morality.
An interesting related recent post from Haidt regards the similarity between the social conservative attitude to sexual purity/sanctity and the left liberal attitude to food and the environment:
That's a direct quote from Popenoe, so our very different intuitions are converging to at least some common ground. That's suggestive of something.
Well, there seem to be strong regularities in the moral intutions developed by healthy humans, strong regularities in our terminal values, strong and predictable regularities in our instrumental values (or more precisely what Gary Drescher calls our "delegated values", what Rawls calls "primary social goods", what it is rational to desire whatever else we desire).
Reason is a tool whereby we can expoit these regularities and so compress our discourse about people's claims against each other; I don't see why we should refrain from using that tool merely because the subject of discourse is a particular subset of human intuitions. We do not shy from using it in our analysis of other types of intuitions, and there is nothing which designates "moral thinking" as less subject to analysis than other types of thinking.
Further, there is some evidence that our moral intutions are changing over time; and they are changing in consequence of our thinking about them. In the same way that we have found it useful for our thinking about the material world to incorporate some insights that we now label "rationality", so I expect to find that our thinking about our own moral intutions (which are part of the material world) will also benefit from these insights.
I don't think Rawls's work is useless or meaningless. Indentifying regularities in human moral intuitions and applying our reasoning to them to clarify or formalize is a worthwhile enterprise. It can help us avoid moral regret, spot injustice and resolve contradictions. But you can't justify the whole edifice rationally. There isn't any evidence to update on beyond the intuitions we already have. You start with your moral intuitions, you don't adopt all of them as a result of evidence. There is no rationalist procedure for adjudicating disputes between people with different intuitions because there isn't any other evidence to tilt the scale.