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Garren 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.
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.