Constant comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
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Okay, but even on this reading you could "shed" similar "light" on absolutely any term that I ever use. You're not proving anything special about morality by that. To do that would require finding differences between morality and, say, rain, or apples. But if we were arguing about apples you could make precisely the same move that you made in this discussion about morality.
Here's a parallel back-and-forth employing apples. Somebody says:
I reply:
Here, let me construct an example with apples. Somebody goes to Tiffany's, points to a large diamond on display, and says to an employee, "that is an apple, therefore you should be willing to sell it to me for five dollars, which is a great price for an apple." This claim is false, and therefore makes for an unconvincing argument.
Somebody replies:
* I interpret "right" and "wrong" here as meaning "true" and "false", because claims are true or false, and these are referring to claims here.
To which they follow up:
** I am continuing the previous interpretation of "right" and "wrong" as meaning, in context here, "true" or "false". If this is not what you meant then I can easily substitute in what you actually meant, make the corresponding changes, and make the same point as I am making here.
What all this boils down to is that my interlocutor is saying that I am only calling claims about apples true or false because I find the arguments that employ these claims convincing or unconvincing. For example, if I happen to be in Tiffany's and somebody points to one of the big shiny glassy-looking things with an enormous price tag and says to an employee, "that is an apple, and therefore you should be happy to accept $5 for it", then I will find that person's argument unconvincing. My interlocutor's point is that I am only calling that person's claim (that that object is an apple) false because I find his argument (that the employee should sell it to him for $5) unconvincing.
Whereas my own account is as follows: I first of all find the person's claim about the shiny glassy thing false. Then, as a consequence, I find his argument (that the employee should be happy to part with it for $5) unconvincing.
If you like I can come up with yet another example, taking place in Tiffany's, dropping the apple, and introducing some action such as grabbing a diamond and attempting to leave the premises. I would have my account (that I, a bystander, saw the man grab the diamond, which I believed to be a wrong act, and therefore when security stopped him I was not persuaded by his claims that he had done nothing wrong), and you would have your reversed account (that I was not persuaded by his claims that he had done nothing wrong, and therefore, as a consequence, I believed his grabbing the diamond to be a wrong act).
It seems to me that right and wrong being objective, just like truth and falsehood, is what you've been trying to prove all this time. To equate "right and wrong" with "true and false" by assumption would be to, well you know, beg the question. It's not surprising that it always comes back to circularity, because a circular argument is the same in effect as an unjustified assertion, and in fact that's become the theme of not just our exchange here, but this entire thread: "objective ethics are true by assertion."
I think we agreed elsewhere that ethical sentiments are at least quasi-universal; is there something else we needed to agree on? Because the rest just looks like wordplay to me.
I'm not equating moral right and wrong with true and false. I was disambiguating some ambiguous words that you employed. The word "right" is ambiguous, because in one context it can mean "morally righteous", and in another context it can mean "true". I disambiguated the words in a certain direction because of the immediate textual context. Apparently that was not what you meant. Okay - so ideally I should go back and disambiguate the words in the opposite direction. However, I can tell you right now it will come to the same result. I don't really want to belabor this point so unless you insist, I'm not actually going to write yet another comment in which I disambiguate your terms "right" and 'wrong" in the moral direction.
But, ah, you can observe the properties of the object in question, and see that it has very few in common with the set of things that has generated the term "apple" in your mind, and many in common with "diamond". Is this the same sense in which you say we can simply "recognize" things as fundamentally good or evil? That would make these terms refer to "what my parents thought was good or evil, perturbed by a generation of meaning-learning". The problem there is - apples are generally recognizable. People disagree on what is right or wrong. Are even apples objective?
People can disagree about gray areas between any two neighboring terms. Take the word "apple". Apple trees are, according to Wikipedia, the species "Malus domestica". But as evolutionary biologists postulated (correctly, as it turns out), species are gradually formed over hundreds or thousands or millions of years, and the question of what is "the first apple tree" is a question for which there is no crystal clear answer, nor would there be even if we had a complete record of every ancestor of the apple tree going back to the one-celled organisms. Rather, the proto-species that gave rise to the apple tree gradually evolves into the apple tree, and about very early apple trees two fully informed rational people might very well disagree about which ones are apple trees and which ones are proto-apple trees. This is nothing other than the sorites problem, the problem of the heap, the problem of the vagueness of concepts. It is universal and is not specifically true about moral questions.
Morality is, I have argued, an aspect of custom. And it's true that people can disagree, on occasion, about whether some particular act violates custom. So custom is, like apples, vague to some degree. Both apples and custom can be used as examples of the sorites problem, if you're sick of talking about sand heaps. But custom is not radically indeterminate. Customs exist, just as apples exist.
Well I agree with this basically, and it reminds me of John Hasnas writing about customary legal systems. I find that when showing this to people I disagree with about ethics we usually end up in agreement:
The quote from John Hasnas seems to be very close to my own view.
Ah, okay! We don't disagree then. Thanks for clearing that up!
ETA: Actually, with that clarification, I'd expect many others to agree as well - at least, it seems like what you mean by "custom" and what other posters have called "stuff people want you to do" coincide.
An important point is that nobody gets to unilaterally decide what is or is not custom. That's in contrast to, say, personal preference, which each person does get to decide for themselves.
Right. Though I'd argue that custom implies that morality is objective, and therefore that custom can be incorrect, so that someone can coherently say that their own society's customs are immoral (though probably from within a subculture that supports those alternate customs).