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asr comments on Pluralistic Moral Reductionism - Less Wrong
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I feel like your austere meta-ethicist is mostly missing the point. It's utterly routine for different people to have conflicting beliefs about whether a given act is moral*. And often they can have a useful discussion, at the end of which one or both participants change their beliefs. These conversations can happen without the participants changing their definitions of words like 'moral', and often without them having a clear definition at all.
[This is my first LW comment -- if I do something wrong, please bear with me]
This suggests that precise definitions or agreement about definitions isn't all that critical. But it's sometimes useful to be able to reason from stipulated and mutually agreed definitions, in which case meta-ethical speculation and reasoning is doing useful work if it offers a menu of crisp, useful, definitions that can be used in discussion of specific moral claims. Relatedly, it's also doing useful work by offering a set of definitions that help people conceptualize and articulate their personal feelings about morality, even absent a concrete first-order question.
And part of what goes into picking definitions is to understand their consequences. A philosopher is doing useful work for me if he shows me that a tempting-sounding definition of 'morality' doesn't pick out the set of things I want it to pick out, or that some other definition turns out not to refer to any clear set at all.
Many mathematical entities have multiple logically equivalent definitions, that are of different utility in different contexts. (E.g., sometimes I want to think about a circle as a locus of points, and sometimes as the solution set to an equation.) In the real world, something similar happens.
When I discuss, say, abortion, with somebody, probably there are multiple working definitions of 'moral' that could be mutually agreed upon for the purpose of the conversation, and the underlying dispute would still be nontrivial and intelligible. But some definitions might be more directly applicable to the discussion -- and philosophical reasoning might be helpful in figuring out what the consequences of various definitions are. For instance, a non-cognitive strikes me intuitively as less likely to be useful -- but I'd be open to an argument showing how it could be useful in a debate.
Probably a great deal of academic writing on meta-ethics is low value. But that's true of most writing on most topics and doesn't show that the topic is pointless. (With academics being major offenders, but not the only offenders.)
*I'm thinking of the individual personal changes in belief that went along with increased opposition to official racism in America over the course of the 20th century. Or opposition to slavery in the 19th.
Welcome to Less Wrong!
Is there a part of your comment that you suspect I disagree with? Or, is there a sentence in my post with which you disagree?
Having had time to mull over -- I think here's something about your post that bothers me. I don't think it's possible to pinpoint a single sentence, but here are two things that don't quite satisfy me.
1) Neither your austere or empathetic meta-ethicists seem to be telling me anything I wanted to hear. What I want is a "linguistic meta-ethicist", who will tell me what other competent speakers of English mean when they use "moral" and suchlike terms. I understand that different people mean different things, and I'm fine with an answer which comes in several parts, and with notes about which speakers are primarily using which of those possible definitions.
What I don't want is a brain scan from each person I talk to -- I want an explanation that's short and accessible enough to be useful in conversations. Conventional ethics and meta-ethics has given a bunch of useful definitions. Saying "well, it depends" seems unnecessarily cautious; saying "let's decode your brain" seems excessive for practical purposes.
2) Most of the conversations I'm in that involve terms like "moral" would be only slightly advanced by having explicit definitions -- and often the straightforward terms to use instead of "moral" are very nearly as contentious or nebulous. In your own examples, you have your participants talk about "well-being" and "non-moral goodness." I don't think that's a significant step forward. That's just hiding morality inside the notion of "a good life" -- which is a sensible thing to say, but people have been saying it since Plato, and it's an approach that has problems of its own.
By the way, I do understand that I may not have been your target audience, and that the whole series of posts has been carefully phrased and well organized, and I appreciate that.
I would think that the Hypothetical Imperatives are useful there. You can thus break down your own opinions into material of the form:
"If the set X of imperative premises holds, and the set Y of factual premises holds, then logic Z dictates that further actions W are imperative.
"I hold X already, and I can convince logic Z of the factual truth of Y, thus I believe W to be imperative."
Even all those complete bastards who disagree with your X can thus come to an agreement with you about the hypothetical as a whole, provided they are epistemically rational. Having isolated the area of disagreement to X, Y, or Z, you can then proceed to argue about it.
asr,
Your linguistic metaethicist sounds like the standard philosopher doing conceptual analysis. Did you see my post on 'Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory'?
I think conversations using moral terms would be greatly advanced by first defining the terms of the debate, as Aristotle suggested. Also, the reason 'well-being' or 'non-moral goodness' are not unpacked is because I was giving brief examples. You'll notice the austere metaethicist said things like "assuming we have the same reduction of well-being in mind..." I just don't have the space to offer such reductions in what is already a long post.
I would find it helpful -- and I think several of the other posters here would as well -- to see one reduction on some nontrivial question carried far enough for us to see that the process can be made to work. If I understand right, your approach requires that speakers, or at least many speakers much of the time, can reduce from disputed, loaded, moral terms to reasonably well-defined and fact-based terminology. That's the point I'd most like to see you spend your space budget on in future posts.
Definitions are good. Precise definitions are usually better than loose definitions. But I suspect that in this context, loose definitions are basically good enough and that there isn't a lot of value to be extracted by increased precision there. I would like evidence that improving our definitions is a fruitful place to spend effort.
I did read your post on conceptual analysis. I just re-read it. And I'm not convinced that the practice of conceptual analysis is any more broken than most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences . My sense is that the standard textbook definitions are basically fine, and that the ongoing work in the field is mostly just people trying to get tenure and show off their cleverness.
I don't see that there's anything terribly wrong with the practice of conceptual analysis -- so long as we don't mistake an approximate and tentative linguistic exercise for access to any sort of deep truth.
I don't think many speakers actually have an explicit ought-reduction in mind when they make ought claims. Perhaps most speakers actually have little idea what they mean when they use ought terms. For these people, emotivism may roughly describe speech acts involving oughts.
Rather, I'm imagining a scenario where person A asks what they ought to do, and person B has to clarify the meaning of A's question before B can give an answer. At this point, A is probably forced to clarify the meaning of their ought terms more thoroughly than they have previously done. But if they can't do so, then they haven't asked a meaningful question, and B can't answer the question as given.
Why? What I've been saying the whole time is that improving our definitions isn't worth as much effort as philosophers are expending on it.
On this, we agree. That's why conceptual analysis isn't very valuable, along with "most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences." (Well, depending on where you draw the boundary around the term 'social sciences.')
Do you see something wrong with the way Barry and Albert were arguing about the meaning of 'sound' in Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory? I'm especially thinking of the part about microphones and aliens.
I agree that emotivism is an accurate description, much of the time, for what people mean when they make value judgments. I would also agree that most people don't have a specific or precise definition in mind. But emotivism isn't the only description and for practical purposes it's often not the most useful. Among other things, we have to specify which emotion we are talking about. Not all disgust is moral disgust.
Value judgments show up routinely in law and in daily life. It would be an enormous, difficult, and probably low-value task to rewrite our legal code to avoid terms like "good cause", "unjust enrichment", "unconscionable contract", and the like. Given that we're stuck with moral language, it's a useful project to pull out some definitions to help focus discourse slightly. But we aren't going to be able to eliminate them. "Morality" and its cousins are too expensive to taboo.
We want law and social standards to be somewhat loosely defined, to avoid unscrupulous actors trying to worm their way through loopholes. We don't want to be overly precise and narrow in our definitions -- we want to leverage the judgement of judges and juries. But conversely, we do want to give them guidance about what we mean by those words. And precedent supplies one sort of guidance, and some definitions give them an additional sort of guidance.
I suspect it would be quite hard to pick out precisely what we as a society mean when we use those terms in the legal code -- and very hard to reduce them to any sort of concrete physical description that would still be human-intelligible. I would be interested to see a counterexample if you can supply one easily.
I have the sense that trying to talk about human judgement and society without moral language would be about like trying to discuss computer science purely in terms of the hardware -- possible, but unnecessarily cumbersome.
One of the common pathologies of the academy is that somebody comes up with a bright idea or a powerful intellectual tool. Researchers then spend several years applying that tool to increasingly diverse contexts, often where the marginal return from the tool is near-zero. Just because conceptual analysis is being over-used doesn't mean that it is always useless! The first few uses of it may indeed have been fairly high-value in aiding us in communicating. The fact that the tool is then overused isn't a reason to ignore it.
Endless wrangles about definitions, I think are necessarily low-value. Working out a few useful definitions or explanations for a common term can be valuable, though -- particularly if we are going to apply those terms in a quasi-formal setting, like law.
That is an important point. People often run on examples as much as or more than they do on definitions,and if their intuitions about examples are strong, that can be used to fix their definitions (ie give them revised definitions that serve their intuitions better).
The rest of the post contained good material that needed saying.
It may be routine in the sense that it often happens, but not routine in the sense that this is a reliable approach to settling moral differences. Often such disputes are not settled despite extensive discussions and no obvious disagreement about other kinds of facts.
This can be explained if individuals are basing their judgments off differing sets of values that partially overlap. Even if both participants are naively assuming their own set of values is the set of moral values, the fact of overlapping will sometimes mean non-moral considerations which are significant to one's values will also be significant for the other's values. Other times, this won't be the case.
For example, many pro-lifers naively assume that everyone places very high value on all human organisms, so they spend a lot of time arguing that an embryo or fetus is a distinct human organism. Anyone who is undecided or pro-choice who shares this value but wasn't aware of the biological evidence that unborn humans are distinct organisms from their mothers may be swayed by such considerations.
On the other hand, many pro-choicers simply do not place equally high value on all human organisms, without counting other properties like sentience. Or — following Judith Jarvis Thomson in "A Defense of Abortion" — they may place equally high value on all human organisms, but place even greater value on the sort of bodily autonomy denied by laws against abortion.
Morality as the expression of pluralistic value sets (and the hypothetical imperatives which go along with them) is a very neat explanation of the pattern we see of agreement, disagreement, and partially successful deliberation.
I agree with all the claims you're making about morality and about moral discussion. But I don't quite see where any of this is giving me any new insights or tools. Sure, people have different but often overlapping values. I knew that. I think most adults who ever have conversations about morality know that. And we know that without worrying too much about the definition of morality and related words.
But I think everything you've said is also true about personal taste in non moral questions. I and my friends have different but overlapping taste in music, because we have distinct but overlapping set of desiderata for what we listen to. And sometimes, people get convinced to like something they previously didn't. I want a meta-ethics that gives me some comparative advantage in dealing with moral problems, as compared to other sorts of disagreements. I had assumed that lukeprog was trying to say something specifically about morality, not just give a general and informal account of human motivation, values, and preferences.
Thus far, this sequence feels like a lot of buildup and groundwork that is true but mostly not in much dispute and mostly doesn't seem to help me accomplish anything. Perhaps my previous comment should just have been a gentle nudge to lukeprog to get to the point.
This may be a case where not getting it wrong is the main point, even if getting it right is a let down.
My own view is quite similar to Luke's and I find it useful when I hear a moral clam to try sorting out how much of the claim is value-expression and how much is about what needs to be done to promote values. Even if you don't agree about values, it still helps to figure out what someone else's fundamental values are and argue that what they're advocating is out of line with their own values. People tend to be mistaken about how to fulfill their own values more than they are about how to fulfill their own taste in music.
Yes.
That is why I can interrogate what somebody means by 'ought' and then often show that by their own definition of ought, what they thought they 'ought' to do is not what they 'ought' to do.
Do you know of anything better?
OTOH, the problem remains that people act on their values, and that one persons actions can affect another person. Pluralistic morality is terrible at translating into a uniform set of rules that all are beholden to.
Why is that the test of a metaethical theory rather than the theory which best explains moral discourse? Categorical imperatives — if that's what you're referring to — are one answer to the best explanation of moral discourse, but then we're stuck showing how categorical imperatives can hold...or accepting error theory.
Perhaps 'referring to categorical imperatives' is not the only or even the best explanation of moral discourse. See "The Error in the Error Theory" by Stephen Finlay.
Because there is a practical aspect to ethics. Moral discourse involves the idea that people should do the obligatory and refrain from the forbidden. -- irrespective of who they are. That needs explaining as well.
Moral discourse is about what to do, but it doesn't seem to (at least always) be about what everyone must do for no prior reason.
Uh-huh. Is that an issue of commission rather than omission? Are people not obligated to refrain from theft murder and rape , their inclinations notwithstanding?
If by 'obligated' you mean it's demanded by those who fear being the targets of those actions, yes. Or if you mean exercising restraint may be practically necessary to comply with certain values those actions thwart, yes. Or if you mean doing those things is likely to result in legal penalties, that's often the case.
But if you mean it's some simple fact that we're morally obligated to restrain ourselves from doing certain things, no. Or at least I don't see how that could even possibly be the case, and I already have a theory that explains why people might mistakenly think such a thing is the case (they mistake their own values for facts woven into the universe, so hypothetical imperatives look like categorical imperatives to them).
The 'commission' vs. 'omission' thing is often a matter of wording. Rape can be viewed as omitting to get proper permission, particularly when we're talking about drugging, etc.
Well, I have a theory about how it could be the case. Objective morality doesn';t have to be a fact-like thing that is paradoxically indetectable. It could be based on the other source of objectivity: logic and reason. It's an analytical truth that you shouldn't do to others what you wouldn't want done to yourself. You are obliged to be moral so long as you can reason morally in the sense that you will be held responsible.
I'm skeptical that this statement is true, let alone an analytic truth. Different people have different desires. I take the Golden Rule to be a valuable heuristic, but no more than that.
What is your reason for believing that it is true as an absolute rule?
Just to clarify where you stand on norms: Would you say a person is obligated by facts woven into the universe to believe that 68 + 57 = 125 ? (ie, are we obligated in this sense to believe anything?)
To stick my own neck out: I am a realist about values. I think there are facts about what we ought to believe and do. I think you have to be, to capture mathematical facts. This step taken, there's no further commitment required to get ethical facts. Obviously, though, there are epistemic issues associated with the latter which are not associated with the former.
Would it be fair to extrapolate this, and say that individual variation in value sets provides a good explanation of the pattern we see of agreement and disagreement between individuals as regards moral values - and possibly in quite different domains as well (politics, aesthetics, gardening)?
You seem to be suggesting meta-ethics aims merely to give a discriptively adequate characterisation of ethical discourse. If so, would you at least grant that many see (roughly) as its goal to give a general characterisation of moral rightness, that we all ought to strive for it?
Facts as in true statements, or facts as in states-of-affiairs?
No, I wouldn't say that. It would be a little odd to say anyone who doesn't hold a belief that 68 + 57 equals 125 is neglecting some cosmic duty. Instead, I would affirm:
In order to hold a mathematically correct belief when considering 68 + 57, we are obligated to believe it equals 125 or some equivalent expression.
(I'm leaving 'mathematically correct' vague so different views on the nature of math are accommodated.)
In other words, the obligation relies on a goal. Or we could say normative answers require questions. Sometimes the implied question is so obvious, it seems strange to bother identifying it.
Yes.
I think that's generally the job of normative ethics, and metaethics is a little more open ended than that. I do grant that many people think the point of ethical philosophy in general is to identify categorical imperatives, not give a pluralistic reduction.