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Peterdjones comments on Pluralistic Moral Reductionism - Less Wrong
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I don't think that works. If you have multiple contradictory judgements being made by multiple standards, and you deem them to be objective, then you end up with multiple contradictoryobjective truths. But I don't think you can have multiple contradictory objective truths.
You are tacitly assuming that the good guys are in the majority, However, sometimes the minority is in the right (as you and I would judge it), and need to persuade the majority to change their ways
It''ll work on people who already subscribe to rationaity, whereas relativism won't.
What's contradictory about the same object being judged differently by different standards?
Here's a standard: return the width of the object in meters. Here's another: return the number of wavelengths of blue light that make up the width of the object. And another: return the number of electrons in the object.
No Universally Compelling Arguments seems relevant here.
You realize that the linked post applies to arguments about mathematics or physics just as much as about morality.
Nothing. There's nothing contradictory about multiple subjective truths or about multiple opinions, or about a single objective truth. But there is a contradiction in multiple objective truths about morality, as I said.
There isn't any contradiction in multiple objective truths about different things; but the original hypothesis was multiple objective truths about the same thing, ie the morality of an action. If you are going to say that John-morality and Mary-morality are different things, that is effectively conceding that they are subjective.
Hmm. Sounds like it would be helpful to taboo "objective" and "subjective". Or perhaps this is my fault for not being entirely clear.
A standard can be put into the form of sentences in formal logic, such that any formal reasoner starting from the axioms of logic will agree about the "judgements" of the standard.
I should mention that this point that I use the word "morality" to indicate a particular standard - the morality-standard - that has the properties we normally associate with morality ("approving" of happiness, "disapproving" of murder, etc). This is the standard I would endorse (by, for example, acting to maximise "good" according to it) were I fully rational and reflectively consistent and non-akrasiac.
So the judgements of other standards are not moral judgements in the sense that they are not statements about the output of this standard. There would indeed be something inconsistent about asserting that other standards made statements about -- ie. had the same output as -- this standard.
Given that, and assuming your objections about "subjectivity" still exist, what do you mean by "subjective" such that the existence of other standards makes morality "subjective", and this a problem?
It already seems that you must be resigned to your arguments failing to work on some minds: there is no god that will strike you down if you write a paperclip-maximising AIXI, for example.
Yep. Subjective statements about X can be phrased in objectivese. But that doesn't make them objective statements about X.
By other standards do you mean other people's moral standards, or non-moral (eg aesthetic standards)?
Of course. But I think moral objectivism is better as an explanation, because it explains moral praise and blame as something other than a mistake; and I think moral objectivism is also better in practice because having some successful persuasion going on is better than having none.
I don't know what you mean, if anything, by "subjective" and "objective" here, and what they are for.
Okay... I think I'll have to be more concrete. I'm going to exploit VNM-utility here, to make the conversation simpler. A standard is a utility function. That is, generally, a function that takes as input the state of the universe and produces as output a number. The only "moral" standard is the morality-standard I described previously. The rest of them are just standards, with no special names right now.
A mind, for example an alien, may be constructed such that it always executes the action that maximises the utility of some other standard. This utility function may be taken to be the "values" of the alien.
Moral praise and blame is not a mistake; whether certain actions result in an increase or decrease in the value of the moral utility function is a analytic fact. It is further an analytic fact that praise and blame, correctly applied, increases the output of the moral utility function, and that if we failed to do that, we would therefore fail to do the most moral thing.
By "subjective" I meant that it is indexed to an individual, and properly so. If Mary thinks vanilla is nice, vanilla is nice-for-Mary, and there is no further fact that can undermine the truth of that -- whereas if Mary thinks the world is flat, there may be some sense in which it is flat-for-Mary, but that doens't count for anything, because the shape of the world is not something about which Mary has the last word.
And there is one such standard in the universe, not one per agent?
If Mary thinks the world is flat, she is asserting that a predicate holds of the earth. It turns out it doesn't, so she is wrong. In the case of thinking vanilla is nice, there is no sensible niceness predicate, so we assume she's using shorthand for nice_mary, which does exist, so she is correct. She might, however, get confused and think that nice_mary being true meant nice_x holds for all x, and use nice to mean that. If so, she would be wrong.
Okay then. An agent who thinks the morality-standard says something other than it does, is wrong, since statements about the judgements of the morality-standard are tautologically true.
There is precisely one morality-standard.
Each (VNM-rational or potentially VNM-rational) agent contains a pointer to a standard -- namely, the utility function the agent tries to maximise, or would try to maximise if they were rational. Most of these pointers within a light year of here will point to the morality-standard. A few of them will not. Outside of this volume there will be quite a lot of agents pointing to other standards.
The focus doesn't have to be on John and Mary; it can be on the morality we're referencing via John and Mary. By analogy, we could talk about John's hometown and Mary's hometown, without being subjectivists about the cities we are referencing.
That isn't analogous, because towns aren;'t epistemic.
Ok, instead of meter measurements, let's look at cubit measurements. Different ancient cultures represented significantly different physical lengths by 'cubits.' So a measurement of 10 cubits to a Roman was a different physical distance than 10 cubits to a Babylonian.
A given object could thus be 'over ten cubits' and 'under ten cubits' at the same time, though in different senses. Likewise, a given action can be 'right' and 'wrong' at the same time, though in different senses.
The surface judgments contradict, but there need not be any propositional conflict.
Isn't this done by appealing to the values of the majority?
Only if — independent of values — certain values are rational and others are not.
Are you sure that people mean different things by 'right' and 'wrong', or are they just using different criteria to judge whether something is right or wrong.
It's done by changing the values of the majority..by showing the majority that they ought (in a rational sense of ought)) think differently. The point being that if correct reasoning eventually leads to uniform results, we call that objective.
Does it work or not? Have majorities not been persuaded that its wrong, if convenient, to oppress minorities?
What could 'right' and 'wrong' mean, beyond the criteria used to make the judgment?
Sure, if you're talking about appealing to people to change their non-fundamental values to be more in line with their fundamental values. But I've still never heard how reason can have anything to say about fundamental values.
So far as I can tell, only by reasoning from their pre-existing values.
"Should be rewarded" and "should be punished". If there was evidence of people saying that the good should be punished, that would indicate that some people are disagreeing about the meaning of good/right. Otherwise, disagreements are about criteria for assigning the term.
But not for all of them (since some of then get discarded) and not only from moral values (since people need to value reason to be reasoned with).