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Peterdjones comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
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We all speak English here to some degree.
The issue is that some words are floating, disconnected from anything in reality, and meaningless. Consider the question: do humans have souls?
What would it mean, in terms of actual experience, for humans to have souls? What is a soul? Can you understand how if someone refused to explain what a soul is, claiming it to be a basic thing which no other words can describe, it would be pretty confusing?
What would it mean, in terms of actual experience, for something to be "morally right"? What characteristics make it that way, and how do you know?
To disbelieve in souls, you have to know what "soul" means, You seem to have mistaken an issue of truth for one of meaning.
I think you are going to have to put up with that unfortunate confusion, since you can't reduce everything to nothing.
Something is morally right if it fulfils the Correct Theory of Morality. I'm not claiming to have that. However, I can recognise theories of morality, and I can do that with my ordinary-language notiion of morality. (The theoretic is always based on the pre-theoretic. We do not reach the theoretic in one bound) I'm not creating stumbling blocks for myself by placing arbitrary requirments on definitions, like insisting that they are both concrete and reductive.
Why do you believe there exists a Correct Theory of Morality?
Why do you believe there exists a Correct Theory of Physics?
As Constant points out here all the arguments based on reductionism that you're using could just as easily be used to argue that there is no correct theory of physics.
One difference between physics and morality is that there is currently a lot more consensus about what the correct theory of physics looks like then what the correct theory of morality looks like. However, that is a statement about the current time, if you were to go back a couple centuries you'd find that there was as little consensus about the correct theory of physics as there is today about the correct theory of morality.
It's not an argument by reductionism...it's simply trying to figure out how to interpret the words people are using - because it's really not obvious. It only looks like reductionism because someone asks, "What is morality?" and the answer comes: "Right and wrong," then "What should be done," then "What is admirable"... It is all moralistic language that, if any of it means anything, it all means the same thing.
Well the original argument, way back in the thread, was NMJablonski arguing against the existence of a "Correct Theory of Morality" by demanding that Peter provide "a clear reductionist description of what [he's] talking about" while "tabooing words like 'ethics', 'morality', 'should', etc.
My point is that NMJablonski's request is about as reasonable as demanding that someone arguing for the existence of a "Correct Theory of Physics" provide a clear reductionist description of what one means while tabooing words like 'physics', 'reality', 'exists', 'experience', etc.
Fair enough, though I suspect that by asking for a "reductionist" description NMJablonski may have just been hoping for some kind of unambiguous wording.
My point, and possibly Peter's, is that given our current state of knowledge about meta-ethics I can give no better definition of the words "should"/"right"/"wrong" than the meaning they have in everyday use.
Note, following my analogy with physics, that historically we developed a systematic way for judging the validity of statements about physics, i.e., the scientific method, several centuries before developing a semi-coherent meta-theory of physics, i.e., empiricism and Bayseanism. With morality we're not even at the "scientific method" stage.
This is consistent with Jablonski's point that "it's all preferences."
In keeping with my physics analogy, saying "it's all preferences" about morality is analogous to saying "it's all opinion" about physics.
You can assume that the words have no specific meaning and are used to signal membership in a group. This explains why the flowchart in the original post has so many endpoints about what morality might mean. It explains why there seems to be no universal consensus on what specific actions are moral and which ones are not. It also explains why people have such strong opinions about morality despite the fact that statements about morality are not subject to empirical validation.
No, the reductionist description of the Correct Theory of Physics eventually involves pointing at lab equipment. There is no lab equipment for morality, so the analogy is not valid.
I could point a gun to your head and ask you to explain why I shouldn't pull the trigger.
That scenario doesn't lead to discovering the truth. If I deceive you with bullshit and you don't pull the trigger, that's a victory for me. I invite you to try again, but next time pick an example where the participants are incentivised to make true statements.
ETA: ...unless the truth we care about is just which flavors of bullshit will persuade you not to pull the trigger. If that's what you mean by morality, you probably agree with me that it is just social signaling.
And if he gave a true moral argument you would have to accept it?
How would you distinguish a true argument from a merely persuasive one?
Like I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the "No Universally Compelling Argument" post you site applies equally well to physical and even mathematical facts (in fact that was what Eliezer was mainly referring to in that post).
In fact, the main point of that sequence is that just because there are no universally compelling arguments doesn't mean truth doesn't exist. As Eliezer mentions in where recursive justification hits bottom:
That morality is not straightforwardly empirical is part of why it is inappropriate to demand concrete definitions.
Do you believe in God? If I defended the notion of God in a similar way -- it is not straightforwardly empirical, it's inappropriate to demand concrete definitions, it's not under the domain of science, just because you can't define it and measure it doesn't mean it doesn't exist -- would you find that persuasive?
But I am only defending the idea that morality means something. Atheists think "God" means something. "uncountable set" means something even if the idea is thoroughly non-concrete.
A correct theory of physics would inform my anticipations.
Please, taboo "anticipations".
Replace anticipations with:
My ability, as a mind (subjective observer), to construct an isomorphism in memory that corresponds to future experiences.
What's an "isomorphism in memory"? What are "future experiences"? And what does it mean for them to "correspond"?
I would be happy to continue down this line a ways longer if you would like, and we could get all the way down to the two of us in the same physical location rebuilding the concept of induction. I am confident that if necessary we could do that for "anticipations" and build our way back up. I am not confident that "morality" as it has been used here actually connects to any solid surface in reality, unless it ends up meaning the same thing as "preferences".
Do you disagree?
In that case maybe we should continue a bit longer until you're disabused of that belief. What I suspect will happen is that you'll continue to attempt to define your words in terms of more and more tenuous abstractions until the words you're using really are almost meaningless.
I think "X is what the correct theory of X says" is true for all X. The Correct Theory can say "Nothing", of course.