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XiXiDu comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
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Begging the question.
Either that is part of my preferences or it isn't.
Either society is instrumental to my goals or it isn't.
Game theory? Instrumental rationality? Cultural anthropology?
If I am able to realize my goals, satisfy my preferences, don't want to play some sort of morality game with agreed upon goals and am not struck by thunder once I violate those rules, why would I care?
What is your definition of irrationality? I wrote that if I am happy, able to reach all of my goals and satisfy all of my preferences while constantly violating the laws of morality, how am I irrational?
It's irrational to think that the evaluative buck stops with your own preferences.
Maybe he doesn't care about the "evaluative buck", which while rather unfortunate, is certainly possible.
If he doesn't care about rationality, he is still being irrational,
Also, what did you mean by
... in response to "Because you will probably be punished, and that tends to not satisfy your preferences." ?
I think you mean that you should correctly predict the odds and disutility (over your life) of potential punishments, and then act rationally selfishly. I think this may be too computationally expensive in practice, and you may not have considered the severity of the (unlikely event) that you end up severely punished by a reputation of being an effectively amoral person.
Yes, we see lots of examples of successful and happy unscrupulous people in the news. But consider selection effects (that contradiction of conventional moral wisdom excites people and sells advertisements).
I meant that we already do have a field of applied mathematics and science that talks about those things, why do we need moral philosophy?
I am not saying that it is a clear cut issue that we, as computationally bounded agents, should abandon moral language, or that we even would want to do that. I am not advocating to reduce the complexity of natural language. But this community seems to be committed to reductionism, minimizing vagueness and the description of human nature in terms of causal chains. I don't think that moral philosophy fits this community.
This community doesn't talk about theology either, it talks about probability and Occam's razor. Why would it talk about moral philosophy when all of it can be described in terms of cultural anthropology, sociology, evolutionary psychology and game theory?
It is a useful umbrella term - rather like "advertising".
Can all of it be described in those terms? Isn't that a philosophical claim?
There's nothing to dispute. You have a defensible position.
However, I think most humans have as part of what satisfies them (they may not know it until they try it), the desire to feel righteous, which can most fully be realized with a hard-to-shake belief. For a rational person, moral realism may offer this without requiring tremendous self-delusion. (disclaimer: I haven't tried this).
Is it worth the cost? Probably you can experiment. It's true that if you formerly felt guilty and afraid of punishment, then deleting the desire to be virtuous (as much as possible) will feel liberating. In most cases, our instinctual fears are overblown in the context of a relatively anonymous urban society.
Still, reputation matters, and you can maintain it more surely by actually being what you present yourself as, rather than carefully (and eventually sloppily and over-optimistically) weighing each case in terms of odds of discovery and punishment. You could work on not feeling bad about your departures from moral perfection more directly, and then enjoy the real positive feeling-of-virtue (if I'm right about our nature), as well as the practical security. The only cost then would be lost opportunities to cheat.
It's hard to know who to trust as having honest thoughts and communication on the issue, rather than presenting an advantageous image, when so much is at stake. Most people seem to prefer tasteful hypocrisy and tasteful hypocrites. Only those trying to impress you with their honesty, or those with whom you've established deep loyalties, will advertise their amorality.