Hm. What is this post for? It doesn't explain the ideas it refers to in any detail sufficient to feel what they mean, and from what it does tell, the ideas seem pretty crazy/simplistic, paying attention to strange categories, like that philpapers survey. (The part before "Mainstream views in metaethics" section does seem to address the topic of the post, but the rest is pretty bizarre. If that was the point, it should've been made, I think, but it probably wasn't.)
My posts are now going to feel naked to me whenever they lack a comment from you complaining that the post isn't book-length, covering every detail of a given topic. :)
Like I said, I don't have much interest in fitting my views into the established categories, but I wanted to give people an overview of how metaethics is usually done so they at least have some illustrations of what the subject matter is.
And if you find mainstream metaethics bizarre, well... welcome to a diseased discipline.
This post covered at least as much material as my old college moral philosophy classes did in a month. It also left me feeling more confident that I understood all the terms involved than that month of classes did. Thank you for being able to explain difficult things clearly and concisely.
I request an explanation of why my comment telling Luke he did a good job is more highly upvoted than the post Luke did a good job on. If you agree with me that Luke did a good job strongly enough to upvote the statement, why not upvote Luke?
Couldn't that just be due to a higher number of total votes (both up an down) for the OP? I would assume fewer people read each comment, and downvoters may have decided to only weigh in on the OP. A hypothetical controversial post could have a karma of 8, with 10 downvotes negating 10 upvotes, and a supportive comment could have 9 upvotes due to half of the upvotes of the first post giving it their vote. The comment has higher karma, but lower volatility, so to speak.
I am increasingly getting the perception that morality/ethics is useless hogwash. I already believed that to be the case before Less Wrong and I am not sure why I ever bothered to take it seriously again. I guess I was impressed that people who are concerned with 'refining the art of rationality' talk about it and concluded that after all there must be something to it. But I have yet to come across a single argument that would warrant the use of any terminology related to moral philosophy.
The article Say Not "Complexity" should have been about mo...
I'm taking a college metaethics class right now, and you have just neatly summarized everything it covers. Thanks!
I must confess I'm having trouble with that flowchart, specifically the first question about whether a moral judgment expresses a belief, and emotivism being on the "no" side. Doesn't, "Ew, murder" express the belief that murder is icky?
To put it another way, I'm having trouble reconciling the map of what people argue about the nature of morality, with what I know of how at least my brain processes moral belief and judgment.
That is, ISTM that moral judgments at the level where emotion and motivation are expressed do not carry any factu...
Where do the views expressed in the book The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It fit in? I'm assuming this is some form of non-cognitivism?
Non-cognitivists, in contrast, think that moral discourse is not truth-apt.
Technically, that's not quite right (except for the early emotivists, etc.). Contemporary expressivists and quasi-realists insist that they can capture the truth-aptness of moral discourse (given the minimalist's understanding that to assert 'P is true' is equivalent to asserting just 'P'). So they will generally explain what's distinctive about their metaethics in some other way, e.g. by appeal to the idea that it's our moral attitudes rather than their contents that have a certain central explanatory role...
Some cognitivists think that [...] Other cognitivists think that [...]
Is there a test of the real world that could tell us that some of them are right and others think wrong? If not, what is the value of describing their thoughts?
It's clear to me that applied and normative ethics deal with real and important questions. They are, respectively, heuristics for certain situations, and analysis of possible failure modes of these heuristics.
But I don't understand what metaethics deals with. You write:
...Metaethics: What does moral language mean? Do moral fa
But don't most philosophers do that: try to assemble all the other philosophers' positions in a chart while maintaining that his own position is too nuanced to be assigned a point on a chart :)
Sometimes one hears the term "moral realism," and in fact that term appears pretty often in your bibliography but not in the main text of your post. Would I be right to think that it comprises everything on the flowchart downstream of the answer "Yes" to the question "Are those beliefs about facts that are constituted by something other than human opinion?"?
Watching this series with interest. I liked the taboo thing in the first post; reminds me of my favorite Hume quote:
'tis usual for men to use words for ideas, and to talk instead of thinking in their reasonings.
Tangent: I think Ayer's observation was correct but he had the implication backwards. The English sentence "Yuck!" contains the assertion "That is bad." and is truth-apt.
I have launched into arguments with people after they expressed distaste, and I think it was at least properly grammatical. A start: "What's yucky about that?"
This is not quite correct. The error theorist can hold that a statement like "Murder is not wrong" is true, for they think that murder is not wrong or right.
Should that be "The error theorist can't hold that a statement like 'Murder is not wrong' is true"?
(Also, it's not clear to me that classifying error theory as cognitivist is correct. If it claims that all moral statements are based on a fundamentally mistaken intuition, so that "Murder is wrong" has no more factual content than "Murder is flibberty", then is ...
How neat is the dichotomy between cognitivists and non-cognitivists? Are there significant philosophical factions holding positions such as
I'm wondering whether emotive responses lack logical content, and also whether belief-based morality requires emotive backing (failure of utilitarianism--yuck!) to move people to action.
Off-Topic: At least for me, your text feels like it is "cut off" -- it does not seem to have a closure -- like a classical solo concert which is stopped after the final cadence of the soloist, before the orchestra sets in again. Is this intended?
One major debate in moral psychology concerns whether moral judgments require some (defeasible) motivation to adhere to the moral judgment (motivational internalism), or whether one can make a moral judgment without being motivated to adhere to it (motivational externalism).
One of the first two "moral judgements" in this confusing sentence is probably a typo. "Defeasible" just makes things more confusing. Maybe follow the vein of your linked Wikipedia paragraph more closely?
Our moral judgments are greatly affected by pointing magnets at the point in our brain that processes theory of mind.
The way this is worded makes it seem that the result is produced by static magnetic fields. And that makes it sound like 19th century pseudo-science.
We use our recently-evolved neocortex to make utilitarian judgments, and deontological judgments tend to come from our older 'chimp' brains.
And the way this is worded makes it seem that you think that the neo-cortex is something that evolved since we separated from the chimps.
...Moral nat
When I say I think I can solve (some of) metaethics, what exactly is it that I think I can solve?
First, we must distinguish the study of ethics or morality from the anthropology of moral belief and practice. The first one asks: "What is right?" The second one asks: "What do people think is right?" Of course, one can inform the other, but it's important not to confuse the two. One can correctly say that different cultures have different 'morals' in that they have different moral beliefs and practices, but this may not answer the question of whether or not they are behaving in morally right ways.
My focus is metaethics, so I'll discuss the anthropology of moral belief and practice only when it is relevant for making points about metaethics.
So what is metaethics? Many people break the field of ethics into three sub-fields: applied ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics.
Applied ethics: Is abortion morally right? How should we treat animals? What political and economic systems are most moral? What are the moral responsibilities of businesses? How should doctors respond to complex and uncertain situations? When is lying acceptable? What kinds of sex are right or wrong? Is euthanasia acceptable?
Normative ethics: What moral principles should we use in order to decide how to treat animals, when lying is acceptable, and so on? Is morality decided by what produces the greatest good for the greatest number? Is it decided by a list of unbreakable rules? Is it decided by a list of character virtues? Is it decided by a hypothetical social contract drafted under ideal circumstances?
Metaethics: What does moral language mean? Do moral facts exist? If so, what are they like, and are they reducible to natural facts? How can we know whether moral judgments are true or false? Is there a connection between making a moral judgment and being motivated to abide by it? Are moral judgments objective or subjective, relative or absolute? Does it make sense to talk about moral progress?
Others prefer to combine applied ethics and normative ethics so that the breakdown becomes: normative ethics vs. metaethics, or 'first order' moral questions (normative ethics) vs. 'second order' questions (metaethics).
To illustrate how people can give different answers to the questions of metaethics, let me summarize some of the mainstream philosophical positions in metaethics.
Cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism: This is a debate about what is happening when people engage in moral discourse. When someone says "Murder is wrong," are they trying to state a fact about murder, that it has the property of being wrong? Or are they merely expressing a negative emotion toward murder, as if they had gasped aloud and said "Murder!" with a disapproving tone?
Another way of saying this is that cognitivists think moral discourse is 'truth-apt' - that is, moral statements are the kinds of things that can be true or false. Some cognitivists think that all moral claims are in fact false (error theory), just as the atheist thinks that claims about gods are usually meant to be fact-stating but in fact are all false because gods don't exist.1 Other cognitivists think that at least some moral claims are true. Naturalism holds that moral judgments are true or false because of natural facts,2 while non-naturalism holds that moral judgments are true or false because of non-natural facts.3 Weak cognitivism holds that moral judgments can be true or false not because they agree with certain (natural or non-natural) opinion-independent facts, but because our considered opinions determine the moral facts.4
Non-cognitivists, in contrast, tend to think that moral discourse is not truth-apt. Ayer (1936) held that moral sentences express our emotions ("Murder? Yuck!") about certain actions. This is called emotivism or expressivism. Another theory is prescriptivism, the idea that moral sentences express commands ("Don't murder!").5 Or perhaps moral judgments express our acceptance of certain norms (norm expressivism).6 Or maybe our moral judgments express our dispositions to form sentiments of approval or disapproval (quasi-realism).7
Moral psychology: One major debate in moral psychology concerns whether moral judgments require some (defeasible) motivation to adhere to the moral judgment (motivational internalism), or whether one can make a moral judgment without being motivated to adhere to it (motivational externalism). Another debate concerns whether motivation depends on both beliefs and desires (the Humean theory of motivation), or whether some beliefs are by themselves intrinsically motivating (non-Humean theories of motivation).
More recently, researchers have run a number of experiments to test the mechanisms by which people make moral judgments. I will list a few of the most surprising and famous results:
Moral epistemology: Different views on cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism and moral psychology suggest different views of moral epistemology. How can we know moral facts? Non-cognitivists and error theorists think there are no moral facts to be known. Those who believe moral facts answer to non-natural facts tend to think that moral knowledge comes from intuition, which somehow has access to non-natural facts. Moral naturalists tend to think that moral facts can be accessed simply by doing science.
I will not be trying very hard to fit my pluralistic moral reductionism into these categories. I'll be arguing about the substance, not the symbols. But it still helps to have a concept of the subject matter by way of such examples.
Maybe mainstream metaethics will make more sense in flowchart form. Here's a flowchart I adapted from Miller (2003). If you don't understand the bottom-most branching, read chapter 9 of Miller's book or else just don't worry about it. (Click through for full size.)
Next post: Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory
Previous post: Heading Toward: No-Nonsense Metaethics
1 This is not quite correct. The error theorist can hold that a statement like "Murder is not wrong" is true, for he thinks that murder is not wrong or right. Rather, the error theorist claims that all moral statements which presuppose the existence of a moral property are false, because no such moral properties exist. See Joyce (2004). Mackie (1977) is the classic statement of error theory.
2 Sturgeon (1988); Boyd (1988); Brink (1989); Brandt (1979); Railton (1986); Jackson (1998). I have written introductions to the three major versions of moral naturalism: Cornell realism, Railton's moral reductionism (1, 2), and Jackson's moral functionalism.
3 Moore (1903); McDowell (1998); Wiggins (1987).
4 For an overview of such theories, see Miller (2003), chapter 7.
5 See Carnap (1937), p. 23-25; Hare (1952).
6 Gibbard (1990).
7 Blackburn (1984).
8 The Knobe Effect. See Knobe (2003).
9 Schnall et al. (2008); Baron & Thomley (1994).
10 Young et al. (2010). I interviewed the author of this study here.
11 This is moral dumfounding. See Haidt (2001).
12 Greene (2007).
13 Zhong et al. (2010).
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