= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes July 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (466)
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?
I'm a fan of using other people's definitions of words, what with the purpose of words being to communicate with other people and all.
Wikipedia does a nice job. This article gives very concise descriptions of different types of subjective and objective ethical theories.
The basic meaning, my summary of an already very summary wikipedia article is this. Subjective ethical theories say that moral statements are LIMITED TO ones on which fully informed well-functioning rational minds could (or do?) disagree, while objective ethical theories hypothesize AT LEAST SOME moral statements which are "mind independent," fully informed well-functioning rational minds would agree because the truth is "out there in the world" and not a creation of the mind.
Dan made an interesting point early on that 'what was right and wrong for humans could be very different from what is right and wrong for an alien intelligence.' On its face, I would measure this statement as an objective and moral statement, and therefore if true, this statement would be part of an objective moral theory. A slightly different statement that I would judge as objective, but not moral, would be 'what a human believes is right and wrong may be very different from what an alien intelligence believes is right and wrong.' In the first version, we are actually making a statement about what IS right and wrong. Saying that ANYTHING is right or wrong is a moral statement.
The fact that we say what IS right and wrong for humans and aliens might be different doesn't make these statements any less objective, anymore than saying "it is wrong to drive on the right side of the road in Britain, but it is wrong to drive on the left side of the road in France." is subjective. Any fully qualified moral statement will need to have the conditions under which the moral statement applies or not. If those qualifications include facts of location, genetics, rank or office, this does not make these statements subjective. As qualified, these statements are still statements about the world whose truth or falsehood would be agreed on by sufficiently informed, well-functioning rational minds.
In favor of subjective morality from my point of view is the idea that in describing human morality, I would have a hard time saying "For Saudi Arabian women, driving a car is wrong." is a true statement. The best I could manage is "Many Saudi Arabians believe that it is wrong for a woman to drive a car." So the idea that the moral opinions of the morons around you would actually obligate you in any way runs counter to my moral intuition.
In favor of objective morality for me is something like "for humans, picking an 8 year old human child at random and chopping off its limbs because you want to see what that feels like to do is wrong." I can't realistically imagine any sense in which I could ever NOT believe that. Following through on that by saying "yeah, but I can't PROVE it so I'm going to call it subjective" seems wimpy to me. Like saying I'm going to claim I don't think "the sun will rise tomorrow" is a true statement so I can enjoy the puerile pleasure of claiming not to need to assume induction.
Note also there don't have to be many moral statements which are objectively true for objective morality to be the case. One will do. If there is one action that is known to be right or wrong about as well as we know the sun will rise tomorrow, then moral statements are in the same neighborhood as physical statements, and you either go the full monty solipsist and NOTHING is real, not even the sun, or you have to describe sensibly why you are willing to make the assumptions necessary to call physical truths "truths," but the analagous assumptions needed to call moral truths "truths" is a step too far.
To summarize, to believe anything is 'objective' requires assumptions. One can justify those assumptions in a variety of ways, but one cannot prove them without at best being circular and at worst just being wrong. To adopt the assumptions necessary for physical realism, and then decide morality is subjective because it doesn't prove objective under the assumptions necessary for physical realism is to only do half the job. The REASON we accept the assumptions necessary for physical realism to be objectively true is because "objectively true" is a useful concept, it helps us build things. Moral truths help us build productive societies, and possibly other things, so the concept of a Moral truth is useful. To accept some physical objective truths, but to decide that moral truths just don't cut it is something I would expect you would have to have a good reason for.
I'm not sure what it means. I hear people say the words, "morals are or may be objective", and I ask them what they mean. And they only answer very vaguely and talk about things like "how can you be sure nothing is objective besides physics and logic" and "there exist undiscovered things that if we knew about we'd describe using the word 'objective'" and so on.
At this point I don't want to assign meaning to "morals are objective". I want to taboo the word and hear some actual statements from someone who came into this discussion assigning concrete meaning to that statement (whether or not they believed it).
Belonging to the same similarity cluster in thing space as mathematics and statements about the world.
In your comment that you link to, you give a more narrow definition, specifying "the scientific method". I agree there might be things outside of that (which will undoubtedly be absorbed into accepted science over time, mutating the concepts of the scientific method to suit new knowledge).
But here you specify all "statements about the world". In that case I can say outright that in no meaningful sense does there "exist" something not in the world which cannot interact with the world. By the generalized p-zombie principle: if it cannot interact with us, then it is not causally involved with your reason for speaking about it. Nothing you will ever think or do or say or believe in, or perceive with your senses, will be causally related to something outside "the world". So there is no reason to ever discuss such a thing.
Further, math (logic) is in the world. It does not have some Platonic independent "existence" because existence is a predicate of things in the physical world; it makes as much sense for a pure circle to exist as to not exist.
The reason we talk about math is that it is lawfully embodied in the physical world. Our brains are so built as to be able to think about math. When we think about math we find that we enjoy it, and also that we can use it for useful purposes of applied science. So we keep talking more about math. That is a complete explanation of where math comes from. No additional postulate of math "objectively existing" is required or indeed meaningful.
I don't find the generalized p-zombie principle particularly convincing, in part because it's not clear what "interact" means.
I think you're using the word "exists" to mean something different from what I mean by it. This may be one source of confusion.
It means 'causally influence in at least one direction'. Two systems are said to interact if knowing something about one of them gives you information about the other.
I know two meanings of the word 'exist'. First, predicate about states of the physical world (and by extension of other counterfactual or hypothetical worlds that may be discussed). There exists the chair I am sitting on. There does not exist in this room a sofa.
Second, 'exists' may be a statement about a mathematical structure. There exist irrational numbers. There exists a solution to a certain problem, but not to another.
What do you mean by 'exists'?