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Wei_Dai comments on A Defense of Naive Metaethics - Less Wrong
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I don't know how to explain "actual meaning", but it seems intuitively obvious to me that the actual meaning of "murder is wrong" is not "murder is forbidden by Yahweh", even if the speaker of the sentence believes that murder is wrong because murder is forbidden by Yahweh. Do you disagree with this?
But the way we actually resolved the debate about 'sound' is by reaching the understanding that there are two distinct concepts (acoustic vibrations and auditory experience) that are related in a certain way and also happen to share the same signifier. If, prior to reaching this understanding, you ask people to stipulate a definition for 'sound' when they use it, they will give you confused answers. I think saying "let's resolve confusions in metaethics by asking people to stipulating definitions for 'morally good'", before we reach a similar level of understanding regarding morality, is to likewise put the cart before the horse.
That doesn't seem intuitively obvious to me, which illustrates one reason why I prefer to taboo terms rather than bash my intuitions against the intuitions of others in an endless game of intuitionist conceptual analysis. :)
Perhaps the most common 'foundational' family of theories of meaning in linguistics and philosophy of language belong to the mentalist program, according to which semantic content is determined by the mental contents of the speaker, not by an abstract analysis of symbol forms taken out of context from their speaker. One straightforward application of a mentalist approach to meaning would conclude that if the speaker was assuming (or mentally representing) a judgment of moral wrongness in the sense of forbidden-by-God, then the meaning of the speaker's sentence refers in part to the demands of an imagined deity.
But "reaching this understanding" with regard to morality was precisely the goal of 'Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory' and 'Pluralistic Moral Reductionism.' I repeatedly made the point that people regularly use a narrow family of signifiers ('morally good', 'morally right', etc.) to call out a wide range of distinct concepts (divine attitudes, consequentialist predictions, deontological judgments, etc.), and that this leads to exactly the kind of confusion encountered by two people who are both using the signifier 'sound' to call upon two distinct concepts (acoustic vibrations and auditory experience).
With regard to "sound", the two concepts are complementary, and people can easily agree that "sound" sometimes refers to one or the other or often both of these concepts. The same is not true in the "morality" case. The concepts you list seem mutually exclusive, and most people have a strong intuition that "morality" can correctly refer to at most one of them. For example a consequentialist will argue that a deontologist is wrong when he asserts that "morality" means "adhering to rules X, Y, Z". Similarly a divine command theorist will not answer "well, that's true" if an egoist says "murdering Bob (in a way that serves my interests) is right, and I stipulate 'right' to mean 'serving my interests'".
It appears to me confusion here is not being caused mainly by linguistic ambiguity, i.e., people using the same word to refer to different things, which can be easily cleared up once pointed out. I see the situation as being closer to the following: in many cases, people are using "morality" to refer to the same concept, and are disagreeing over the nature of that concept. Some people think it's equivalent to or closely related to the concept of divine attitudes, and others think it has more to do with well-being of conscious creatures, etc.
When many people agree that murder is wrong but disagree on the reasons why, you can argue that they're referring to the same concept of morality but confused about its nature. But what about less clear-cut statements, like "women should be able to vote"? Many people in the past would've disagreed with that. Would you say they're referring to a different concept of morality?
I'm not sure what it means to say that people have the same concept of morality but disagree on many of its most fundamental properties. Do you know how to elucidate that?
I tried to explain some of the cause of persistent moral debate (as opposed to e.g. sound debate) in this way:
Let me try an analogy. Consider someone who believes in the phlogiston theory of fire, and another person who believes in the oxidation theory. They are having a substantive disagreement about the nature of fire, and not merely causing unnecessary confusion by using the same word "fire" to refer to different things. And if the phlogiston theorist were to say "by 'fire' I mean the release of phlogiston" then that would just be wrong, and would be adding to the confusion instead of helping to resolve it.
I think the situation with "morality" is closer to this than to the "sound" example.
(ETA: I could also try to define "same concept" more directly, for example as occupying roughly the same position in the graph of relationships between one's concepts, or playing approximately the same role in one's cognitive algorithms, but I'd rather not take an exact position on what "same concept" means if I can avoid it, since I have mostly just an intuitive understanding of it.)
This is the exact debate currently being hashed out by Richard Joyce and Stephen Finlay (whom I interviewed here). A while back I wrote an article that can serve as a good entry point into the debate, here. A response from Joyce is here and here. Finlay replies again here.
I tend to side with Finlay, though I suspect not for all the same reasons. Recently, Joyce has admitted that both languages can work, but he'll (personally) talk the language of error theory rather than the language of moral naturalism.
I'm having trouble understanding how the debate between Joyce and Finlay, over Error Theory, is the same as ours. (Did you perhaps reply to the wrong comment?)
Sorry, let me make it clearer...
The core of their debate concerns whether certain features are 'essential' to the concept of morality, and thus concerns whether people share the same concept of morality, and what it would mean to say that people share the concept of morality, and what the implications of that are. Phlogiston is even one of the primary examples used throughout the debate. (Also, witches!)
I'm still not getting it. From what I can tell, both Joyce and Finlay implicitly assume that most people are referring to the same concept by "morality". They do use phlogiston as an example, but seemingly in a very different way from me, to illustrate different points. Also, two of the papers you link to by Joyce don't cite Finlay at all and I think may not even be part of the debate. Actually the last paper you link to by Joyce (which doesn't cite Finlay) does seem relevant to our discussion. For example this paragraph:
I will read that paper over more carefully, and in the mean time, please let me know if you still think the other papers are also relevant, and point to specific passages if yes.
This article by Joyce doesn't cite Finlay, but its central topic is 'concessive strategies' for responding to Mackie, and Finlay is a leading figure in concessive strategies for responding to Mackie. Joyce also doesn't cite Finlay here, but it discusses how two people who accept that Mackie's suspect properties fail to refer might nevertheless speak two different languages about whether moral properties exist (as Joyce and Finlay do).
One way of expressing the central debate between them is to say that they are arguing over whether certain features (like moral 'absolutism' or 'objectivity') are 'essential' to moral concepts. (Without the assumption of absolutism, is X a 'moral' concept?) Another way to say that is to say that they are arguing over the boundaries of moral concepts; whether people can be said to share the 'same' concept of morality but disagree on some of its features, or whether this disagreement means they have 'different' concepts of morality.
But really, I'm just trying to get clear on what you might mean by saying that people have the 'same' concept of morality while disagreeing on fundamental features, and what you think the implications are. I'm sorry my pointers to the literature weren't too helpful.
An analogy for "sharing common understanding of morality". In the sound example, even though the arguers talk about different situations in a confusingly ambiguous way, they share a common understanding of what facts hold in reality. If they were additionally ignorant about reality in different ways (even though there would still be the same truth about reality, they just wouldn't have reliable access to it), that would bring the situation closer to what we have with morality.
Can you elaborate this a bit more? I don't follow.
Even by getting such confused answers out in the open, we might get them to break out of complacency and recognize the presence of confusion. (Fat chance, of course.)