My impression is that people tend to be exposed to grammar early on in school, in the form of a lot of arbitrary-seeming rules, which do not necessarily correspond with the colloquial spoken language. In English class in elementary and high school, I was taught never to split an infinitive (maybe I should say, "to never split an infinitive") and that the verb "to be" takes the nominative -- "that is I" rather than "that's me." Later, I learned that serious academic grammar scholars tend not spend their time issuing or enforcing random rules, but rather mostly observe and analyze how people use grammar -- regional and temporal shifts in the way the language is used. In that sense, language is value-neutral. Neither French nor English is "better" than the other in a general sense, French is not just degenerate Latin, Shakespeare and Chaucer and the author of Beowulf all use the grammar of English appropriate to their times. Valley-girl English and Ebonics and West Virginia dialect are all equally valid and internally consistent, according to this approach.
Can this same analysis be applied to moral codes? If it can, even in principle, then we have some problems. As I understand it, "morality" is all about values. I think EY has considered this issue seriously, and has alluded to it in Three Worlds Collide.
Can this same analysis be applied to moral codes? If it can, even in principle, then we have some problems. As I understand it, "morality" is all about values. I think EY has considered this issue seriously, and has alluded to it in Three Worlds Collide.
You should look at the metaethics sequence.
If you've spent any time with foreigners learning your language, you may have been in conversations like this:
People can't automatically state the rules underlying language, even though they follow them perfectly in their daily speech. I've been made especially aware of this when teaching French to Chinese students, where I had to frequently revise my explanation, or just say "sorry, I don't know what the rule is for this case, you'll just have to memorize it". You learn separately how to speak the language and how to apply the rules.
Morality is similar: we feel what's wrong and what's right, but may not be able to formulate the underlying rules. And when we do, we're likely to get it wrong the first time. For example you might say:
But unlike grammar, people don't always agree on right and wrong : if Alfred unintentionally harms Barry, Barry is more likely to think that what Alfred did was morally wrong, even if both started off with similar moral intuitions. So if you come up with an explanation and insist it's the definition of morality, you can't be "proven wrong" nearly as easily as on grammar. You may even insist your explanation is true, and adjust your behavior accordingly, as some religious fanatics seem to do ("what is moral is what God said" being a quite common rule people come up with to explain morality).
So: beware of your own explanations. Morality is a complex topic, you're even more likely to shoot yourself in the foot than with grammar, and even less likely to realize that you're wrong.
(edit) Related posts by Eliezer: Fake Justification, Fake Selfishness, Fake Morality.