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lukeprog comments on A Defense of Naive Metaethics - Less Wrong
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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.
Unfortunately I'm not sure how to explain it better than I already did. But I did notice that Richard Chappell made a similar point (while criticizing Eliezer):
Does his version makes any more sense?
Chappell's discussion makes more and more sense to me lately. Many previously central reasons for disagreement turn out to be my misunderstanding, but I haven't re-read enough to form a new opinion yet.
Sure, except he doesn't make any arguments for his position. He just says:
I don't think normative debates are always "merely verbal". I just think they are very often 'merely verbal', and that there are multiple concepts of normativity in use. Chappel and I, for example, seem to have different intuitions (see comments) about what normativity amounts to.
Let's say a deontologist and a consequentialist are on the board of SIAI, and they are debating which kind of seed AI the Institute should build.
D: We should build a deontic AI.
C: We should build a consequentialist AI.
Surely their disagreement is substantive. But if by "we should do X", the deontologist just means "X is obligatory (by deontic logic) if you assume axiomatic imperatives Y and Z." and the consequentialist just means "X maximizes expected utility under utility function Y according to decision theory Z" then they are talking past each other and their disagreement is "merely verbal". Yet these are the kinds of meanings you seem to think their normative language do have. Don't you think there's something wrong about that?
(ETA: To any bystanders still following this argument, I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself without making much progress in resolving this disagreement. Any suggestion what to do?)
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.