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hairyfigment comments on Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations? - Less Wrong
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Wow. I've been guilty of this for a while, and not realized it. That "is this action morally wrong" question really struck me.
Myself, I believe that there is an objective morality outside humanity, one that is, as Eliezer would deride the idea, "written on a stone tablet somewhere". This may be an unpopular hypothesis, but accepting it is not a prerequisite for my point. When asked about why certain actions were immoral, I, too, have reached for the "because it harms someone" explanation... an explanation which I just now see as the sin of Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points.
What I really believe, upon much reflection, is that there are two overlapping, yet distinct, classes of "wrong" actions: one we might term "sins", and the other we might term "social transgressions". Social Transgressions is that class of acts which are punishable by society, usually those that are harmful. Sins is that class of acts which goes against this Immutable Moral Law. Examples are given below, being (in the spirit of full disclosure) the first examples I thought of, and neither the more pure examples, nor the most defensible, non-controversial examples.
I do not know if this is a defensible position, but I now recognize it as a clearer form of what I believe than what I had previously claimed to believe.
What, specifically, were you guilty of? And how does your new formulation solve the problem? Re-reading the OP doesn't make this clear for me.
It seems like the talk of rationalization in the OP made you notice rationalization of a different kind in yourself. You would previously justify moral claims using reasoning that did not even appeal to your alleged premises. Now you associate this with Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points, because until now you didn't notice the discrepancy. Postulating two different kinds of moral beliefs may solve this problem and certainly improves the situation in the sense that it allows you to give the real reasons behind some of your moral beliefs.
But it doesn't begin to address the OP.
You appear to have separated out the part of your moral approach that you don't understand yet, shoved it in a box and labelled it "sins". Now if you intend to figure out the contents of the box or prove that it has such a small effect you can ignore it, then this seems like a perfectly good method of inquiry (one that resembles Feynman's approach to quantum mechanics). But you appear to say that you still think the contents of the box come from a "Law" that exists "outside humanity", and as yet I've seen you give no reason for continuing to believe this.