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asr comments on Pluralistic Moral Reductionism - Less Wrong
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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.