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PhilGoetz comments on Morality is not about willpower - Less Wrong
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Comments (144)
I agree with this critique. Basically, the problem with PhilGoetz's view is that we do need a word for the kind of informal dispute resolution and conflict de-escalation we all do within social groups, and in our language we use the word ethics for that, not morality.
"Morality" connotes either the inner "moral core" of individuals, i.e. the values PhilGoetz talks about in this post, or social "moral codes" which do proscribe "socially good behavior" everyone is expected to follow, but are pretty much unrelated to the kind of dispute resolution which concerns ethics.
Yes, there is a weird inversion in etymology, with morality being connected with a word for "custom" and ethics with "character". But etymology does not always inform the current meaning of words.
I'm interested, but skeptical that English makes this clear distinction. I'd really appreciate references to authoritative sources on the distinction in meaning between morality and ethics.
The SEP article on the definition of morality seems fairly clear to me. Yes, the article tries to advance a distinction between "descriptive" and "normative" morality. But really, even descriptive morality is clearly "normative" to those who follow it in the real world. What they call "normative" morality should really be called "moral philosophy", or "the science/philosophy of universalized morality" (CEV?), or, well... ethics. Including perhaps "normative ethics", i.e. the values that pretty much all human societies agree about, so that philosophers can take them for granted without much issue.
It does not really help your case to simultaneously lean on SEP as an authority and claim that it is wrong.
Why? I'm not trying to rely on SEP as an authority here. Indeed, given your own findings about how the terms are used in the philosophical literature, no such authority could plausibly exist.
What I can hope to show is that my use of the terms is more meaningful than others' (it "carves concept-space at its joints") and that it's at least roughly consistent with what English speakers mean when they talk about "morality" and "ethics". AFAICT, the SEP entry supports my argument: it exemplifies a meaningful distinction between "descriptive" and "normative" morality, which most English-speaking folks would readily describe as a distinction between "morality" and "ethics".
Then just use "descriptive" and "normative"... The concept space is already carved the way you like it, get your hand out of the cake.
I don't use these terms because they have undesirable connotations and are unfamiliar to most English speakers. Calling morality as it is actually reasoned about in the real world "descriptive" only makes sense as a way of emphasizing that you seek to describe something as opposed to endorsing it. OK for philosophers (and folks working on CEV, perhaps), not so much for everyone else.
Then it was a particularly bad choice as a response when asked for an authoritative source.