Wei_Dai comments on A Defense of Naive Metaethics - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Will_Sawin 09 June 2011 05:46PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 27 June 2011 07:07:34PM *  3 points [-]

I'm fine with Will using 'ought' in that sense if he wants. I'll try to be clear how I am using the term when I use it.

That doesn't seem right. Compare (note that I don't necessarily endorse the rest of this paper) :

What does the word ‘ought’ mean? Strictly speaking, this is an empirical question, about the meaning of a word in English. Such empirical semantic questions should ideally be answered on the basis of extensive empirical evidence about the use of the word by native speakers of English.

As a philosopher, I am primarily interested, not in empirical questions about the meanings of words, but in the nature of the concepts that those words can be used to express — especially when those concepts are central to certain branches of philosophy, as the concepts expressed by ‘ought’ are central to ethics and to the theory of rational choice and rational belief. Still, it is often easiest to approach the task of giving an account of the nature of certain concepts by studying the meanings of the words that can express those concepts. This is why I shall try here to outline an account of the meaning of ‘ought’.

If you examine just one particular sense of the word "ought", even if you make clear which sense, but without systematically enumerating all of the meanings of the word, how can you know that the concept you end up studying is the one that is actually important, or one that other people are most interested in?

Comment author: lukeprog 27 June 2011 08:31:08PM 0 points [-]

I suspect there are many senses of a word like 'ought' that are important. As 'pluralistic moral reductionism' states, I'm happy to use and examine multiple important meanings of a word.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 28 June 2011 01:24:28AM *  4 points [-]

Let me expand my comment a bit, because it didn't quite capture what I wanted to say.

I'm fine with Will using 'ought' in that sense if he wants.

If Will is anything like a typical human, then by "ought" he often means something other than, or more than, the sense referred to by "that sense", and it doesn't make sense to say that perhaps he wants to use "ought" in that sense.

When you say "I'm fine with ..." are you playing the role of the Austere Metaethicist who says "Tell me what you mean by 'right', and I will tell you what is the right thing to do."? But I think Austere Metaethics is not a tenable metaethical position, because when you ask a person to tell you what they mean by "right", they will almost certainly fail to give you a correct answer, simply because nobody really understands (much less can articulate) what they mean by "right". So what is the point of that?

Or perhaps what you meant to say instead was "I'm fine with Will studying 'ought' in that sense if he wants"? In that case see my grandparent comment (but consider it directed mostly towards Will instead of you).

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