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mwengler comments on Rationality Quotes July 2012 - Less Wrong
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In that same wikipedia article, follow the link to Moral Nihilism to learn
If morality is not objective, than moral propositions do not have true-or-falseness about them, and all the discussions about morality are vapid.
What Chang means is he gets to make it up as he goes along because 1) it is not wrong to make it up as he goes along because in nihilism, nothing is "wrong," and 2) there isn't a "right" either.
Its possible a slightly warm-and-fuzzier Chang would choose Moral Relativism which is Moral Nihilism's more conventional 2nd cousin. But Nihilism makes for a much better story, it is stark and even the word sounds ominous.
It seems very obvious and uncontroversial to me that morality is not objective. (Yay typical mind fallacy!) Morality is, or arises from, a description of human actions, judgements and thoughts. Aliens who behaved completely differently should be said to have different morals.
It's not clear to me why someone would even think to argue for objective (=universally correct and unique) morals unless motivated by religion or tradition.
Of course, it's also clear to me that our subjective morals add up to normality. For instance murder is generally morally wrong. Of course that should be read to say it's wrong in our eyes! Of course things are not right or wrong in themselves; value judgements, including moral values, are passed by observers who have values/preferences/moral theories.
It seems to me that nihilism, if it is commonly understood to mean this, should be accepted by pretty much any materialist. This doesn't seem to be the case. What am I missing? What are the reasons to think there's something in nature (or in logic, perhaps) that should be identified as "objective morals"?
If I said "Murder is NOT wrong for humans, it is just a matter of personal choice" and you said "no you are wrong, murder is wrong for humans" I would conclude you are a moral realist, not a nihilist. I made a moral statement and you told me I was wrong. You seem to believe that that moral statement is either true or false no matter who says it, that "I think I'll murder Dan" is not just a subjective choice like "I think I'll read a Neil Gaiman book tonight" might be.
But you also characterize morality as a description of human actions. If I say "I notice that murder is said to be wrong by many people but is practiced by some non-trivial minority of humans, there fore, since I observe it is part of the human moral landscape, I will pick a kid at random in the mall and shoot him." and you say "no, you shouldn't" then you are probably a moral realist. You apparently think that the proposition I proposed has a truth or falseness to it that exists outside yourself, and you are expressing to me that this statement I made is false.
My moral nihilism which I have abandoned perhaps a week ago arose from my comparing the quality of moral facts and fact finding to the quality of scientific facts and fact finding. Science seemed developed through an objective process: you had to test the world to see if statements about the world were true or false. Whereas morality seemed to come entirely from intuitions and introspection. "you shouldn't kill random kids in the mall." "You should recycle." Blah blah blah where is even the test? In my case I was a nihilist in that I thought there was no sensible way to declare a moral statement to be a "fact" rather than a choice, but I was totally willing to kill reflecting my choices (i.e., kill someone who threatened me or my friends or my family). So I had what I thought was a de facto morality that I thought could not be justified as "fact" in the same way that engineering and physics textbooks could be justified.
Upon being reminded of "the problem of induction" I remembered that scientific facts are deduced from ASSUMPTIONS. We just do a pretty good job if aligning with reality is your standard. So the feature that any moral conclusions I was going to reach would necessarily be deduced from assumptions was not enough to relegate them to mere choices.
It could be that we are nowhere near as good at figuring out what the moral facts are as we are at figuring out what the scientific facts are. But 3000 years ago, we weren't very good at scientific facts either, and that presumably didn't stop them from being facts, we just didn't know much about them yet.
So maybe morality CAN'T be known as well as science, or maybe it can, we just haven't figure it out yet.
But to be a proper nihilist, you need to accept that murder is not wrong (it is not right either). Are you down with that?
I'd like to tie up some of the things you said in your first and second posts in this thread.
You started with:
and I responded with a link to the definition of moral nihilism in wikipedia, saying moral nihilism is the label for the belief that there are no objective moral truths or falsehoods.
You responded with
When you say something is "uncontroversial," that means that, barring some class of people too stupid or whacky to be bothered with, people competent to have an opinion agree with you that it is obvious that morality is not objective.
In response to that I briefly summarized moral realism and linked to its wikipedia entry. By this I intended to show that the community of people who believed morality to be objective was competent and obvious enough to have a simple label on their belief, with that label cited and explained widely by (it seems) everybody who bothers to summarize moral philosophy.
I did NOT mean to suggest that moral realism is obvious or that I believe it or that the negation of moral realism is obvious or that I believe that. I DID mean to suggest that it IS controversial, meaning literally that there are moral realists who controvert ("speak against") nihilists and nihilists who speak against moral realists.
From there we go in to the weeds, or at least I do. First, I muddied the waters by talking about a particular example which I thought clarified some issues but which seems to clarify nothing, so it is not worth even mentioning again.
But the other sort of amazing thing to me is you keep asking me to defiine moral realism. What do you want me to do, copy the first few paragraphs from the wikipedia article? I'm not going to do a better job than they do. If you think the definition is dopey or meaningless or whatever, then oh well. I have nothing to add.
A belief that morality is subjective is controversial by any straightforward meaning of that word, nothing else I have said is as relevant to anything else you have said as that.
To quote the definition of moral realism from Wikipedia:
This immediately raises three questions:
But most importantly:
The knowledge or belief in moral realism is acquired. People may be born with moral realist intuitions, but they are not born with coherent arguments in favor of moral realism. And no-one has the right to just believe something without proof.
So my question is: what is the evidence that convinced any moral realist to be a moral realist? This is essential, all else is secondary.
I've not found such evidence anywhere. In everything that I've read about moral realism, people are just trying to justify intuitions they have about morals, to claim that if not their morals then at least some morals must be objective and universal. As far as I can tell right now, the sole cause of some people being moral realists is that it gives them pleasure to believe so. They have faith in moral realism, as it were.
Then, assuming that belief is provisionally true, they look for models of that world that will allow it to be true. But such reasoning is wrong. They must show evidence for moral realism in order to have the right to believe in it.
Beliefs in gods, fairies, and p-zombies are also controversial. That doesn't make them worthy of discussion.
In my phrasing in previous posts I may have assumed you yourself were at least uncertain about the truth of moral realism, and therefore knew of some valid argument for it. I talked of things being controversial or not on LW, not among all humanity. I'm sorry that that was unclear and confused the conversation.
You can replace the phrase "moral realist" with "physical realist" in the above statement and your subsequent argument and it remains equally valid.
What exactly do you mean by 'physical realism'? At first I thought it was something like the simple claim that "the physical world objectively exists independently of us", or maybe like positivism. But googling 'physical realism' brings up mostly pseudoscientific nonsense, so it may not be a commonly used term, and there are no wikipedia/Stanford/etc. entries. So I wanted to make sure what you meant by it.
More or less this.
OK. Then your point is that people believe in physical reality, that exists independently of them, only because of intuition - the way their minds are shaped. This is correct as a description of why people in fact believe in it.
The rejection of physical realism is solipsism. It is not a fruitful position, however, in the sense that people who say they don't believe in physical reality still act as if though they believe in it. They don't get to ignore pain, or retreat into an imaginary world inside their heads. I believe this is known as the "I refute it thus!" kicking-a-stone argument.
My argument against moral realism does not work against physical realism. My argument is basically "show me the evidence", and physical anti-realism rejects the very concept of evidence. Physical realism is a requirement for my argument and for every other argument about the physical world, too.
Regarding the more general point that we only believe in physical realism because of intuitions, and we have similar intuitions for moral realism. Once we understand why a certain intuition exists, evolutionarily speaking, that accounts for the entirety of the evidence given by the intuition.
For instance we have a strong intuition that physics is Aristotelian in nature, and not relativistic or quantum. We understand why: because it is a good model of the physical world we deal with at our scale; relativistic and quantum phenomena do not happen much at our scale, so evolution didn't build us to intuit them.
Similarly, we have moral intuitions, which both say things about morals and also say that morals are objective. From an evolutionary perspective, we understand why humans who believed their morals to be objective tended to win out over those who publicly proclaimed they were subjective and malleable. And that's a complete explanation of that intuition; it doesn't provide evidence that morals are really objective.
At this point I might ask you what you both think you mean by morals being "really objective".
Does it mean that all minds must be persuaded by it? But that is of course false, since there is always a mind that does the opposite. Does it mean that it's written on a stone tablet in space somewhere? But that seems irrelevant, because who would want to follow random stone-commandments found in space anyway, and what if someone modified the stone tablet? Does it mean something else?
The definition of prime numbers isn't found on a stone tablet anywhere, or written in the fabric of space-time. Only the pebblesorters would be persuaded by an argument that a heap of 21 pebbles is composite. Yet would you say that the number 21 is "objectively" composite? Is the "existence" of anything necessary to make 21 composite?
It would seem that you believe that. So what is your proof?
And that is a moral statement to boot.
From the more physicsy side, I'd guess you believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that electrons at the center of the earth have the same rest mass and charge as the insanely small number of electrons that have actually had their mass and charge carefully measured. You probably believe a or not-a and that 2+2=4. Are you familiar with Godel's theorem? My recollection of it is that he proved that any formal system above a certain trivial level of complexity had true statements in it that were unprovable.
I can tell you the easy way out is to claim you don't believe anything, that it is all in your head, not just the moral stuff. Of course then we need to invent new language to describe the difference between statements like "no-one has the right to just believe something without proof" and "no-one has the right to just believe something with proof." I guess you could say that just because you believe something doesn't mean you believe it is true, but that starts to sound more like a non-standard definition of the word "believe" than anything with useful content.
As to my explaining to you the details of why anyone should be a moral realist, I"m not interested in attempting that. I'm not a committed moral realist myself, and I'd just have to do a lot of reading myself to find a good description of what ask for. Sorry.
Proof is only meaningful in a system of shared assumptions (physics) or axioms (logic).
The statement that "it's wrong to believe without proof", equivalently, that "a single correct set of beliefs is mandated given by your proof (=evidence) and assumptions (=prior)", is a logical consequence of the rules of Bayesian deduction.
If moral realists, or anyone else, doesn't agree to Bayesianism or another commonly understood framework of proof, logic, and common assumptions, then I'm not interested in talking to them (about moral realism).
I believe all those things (with very high probability, to be pedantic). I know Godel's incompleteness theorems.
Saying that some true things are formally unprovable in a logic system is not significant evidence that any specific unproven statement (eg moral realism) is in fact true just because it's not disproven. And the theorem doesn't apply to probabilistic belief systems modeling the physical universe: I can have an arbitrary degree of confidence in a belief, as long as it's not probability 1, without requiring logical proof.
However, the situation for moral realism isn't "unproven conjecture", it's more like "unformalized conjecture whose proponents refuse to specify what it actually means". At least that's the state of debate in this thread.
Yet you assign sufficient probability to moral realism to think it's worth discussing or reading about. Otherwise you'd have said from the start, "I agree with you that moral realism has no evidence for it, let's just drop the subject". To have such a high prior requires evidence. If you don't have such evidence, you are wrong.
I'm glad you recognize that. Then you should also recognize that for reasons having nothing to do with logical necessity you have accepted some things as true which are unprovable, in your case a particular interpretation of how to do Bayesian.
All you have offered so far is assertion, and the appearance that you don't even realize that you are making assumptions until after it is pointed out. When I found my self in that position, it humbled me a bit. In Bayesian terms, it moved all of my estimates further from 0 and 1 than they had been.
In any case, whatever program you have used to decide what you could assume, what if your assumptions are incomplete? What if you simply haven't tried hard enough to have something "more than zero" on the moral side?
So you have picked your church and your doctrine and you wish to preserve your orthodoxy by avoiding intelligent apostates. This is not a new position to take, but it has always seemed to me to be a very human bias, so I am surprised to see it stated so baldly on a website devoted to avoiding human biases in the twenty-first century. Which is to say, are you SURE you want to treat your assumptions as if they were the one true religion?
Why limit yourself to this one thread, populated as it isn't by anyone who claims any real expertise?
Your particular rejection of moral realism doesn't seem to reflect much knowledge. For a Bayesian, knowing that other intelligent minds have looked at something, gathered LOTS of evidence and done lots of analysis, and reached a different conclusion than your prior should LOWER your certainty in your prior. Finding one guy who can't or won't spoonfeed you concentrated moral realism, and claiming on that basis that your prior of essentially zero must stand is not at all how I interpret the Bayesian program. In my interpretation, it is when I am ignorant that my mind is most open, that my estimates are furthest from 0 and 1.
I wish someone like Eliezer, or who knows his morality well enough, would pipe in on this, because from my reading of Eliezer, he is also a moral realist. Not that that proves anything, but it is relevant bayesian evidence.
Apologies for replying late.
You seem to misunderstand my comments.
Normally one tries to assume as little as necessary. To argue in favour of new assumptions, one might show that they are necessary (or even sufficient) for some useful, desirable conclusions. Are there any such here? If not, why assume e.g. moral realism when one could just as well assume any of infinitely many alternatives?
NO. This is completely wrong. You have not understood my position.
I said:
Note emphasis. I am not demanding dialogue within a specific worldview. I'm asking that the rules of the worldview being discussed be stated clearly. I'm asking for rigorous definitions instead of words like "morality objectively exists", which everyone may understand differently.
This thread is on LW. When people here said they gave a high prior to moral realism (i.e. did not dismiss it as I did), I assumed they were rational about it: that they had some evidence to support such a prior. By now it's pretty clear that this is not the case, so after these last few posts of clarification I think the thread should end.
As for looking elsewhere, I did when referred - as with the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy - and the presumably high quality summaries there confirmed me in my belief that there's nothing to moral realism, it's not a defensible or even well defined position, and it is not worth investigating.
I lowered it. That's why I was willing to spend time on this conversation. Then I examined the evidence those other minds could offer and raised my certainty way back up.
That is just wrong. A prior of zero knowledge does not mean assigning 0.5 probability to every proposition. Propositions are entangled, so that would be inconsistent. Besides, you have evidence-based priors about other propositions entangled with this one, so your prior isn't naive anyway.
No he's not. See this post which was recently on Sequence Reruns and the other posts linked from it. See also the entire Metaethics Sequence in the wiki and in particular this post in two parts arguing against simple moral realism.
Perhaps they misunderstood what was referred to by "moral realism". The phrase certainly doesn't seem to be very well defined. For example Eliezer does say that there are things that are actually right, and actually wrong. mwengler seems to think this is sufficient to make him a moral realist. You don't. Classic recipe for confusion.