There seems to be some division on this point.
I might be mistaken but I got the feeling that there's not much of a division, the picture I've got of LW on meta-ethics is something along the lines of: values exist in peoples heads, those are real, but if there were no people there wouldn't be any values. Values are to some extent universal, since most people care about similar things, this makes some values behave as if they were objective. If you want to categories - though I don't know what you would get out of it, it's a form of nihilism.
An appropriate question when discussing objective and subjective morality is:
People here seem to share anti-realist sensibilities but then balk at the label and do weird things for anti-realists like treat moral judgments as beliefs, make is-ought mistakes, argue against non-consequentialism as if there were a fact of the matter, and expect morality to be describable in terms of a coherent and consistent set of rules instead of an ugly mess of evolved heuristics.
I'm not saying it can never be reasonable for an anti-realist to do any of those things, but it certainly seems like belief in subjective or non-cognitive morality hasn't filtered all the way through people's beliefs.
I attribute this behavior in part to the desire to preserve the possibility of universal provably Friendly AI
Well that seems like the most dangerous instance of motivated cognition ever.
After reading lots of debates on these topics, I'm no longer sure what the terms mean. Is a paperclip maximizer a "moral nihilist"? If yes, then so am I. Same for no.
I see no reason to think a paperclip maximizer would need to have any particular meta-ethics. There are possible paperclip maximizers that are and one's that aren't. As rule of thumb, an agent's normative ethics, that is, what it cares about, be it human flourishing or paperclips does not logically constrain it's meta-ethical views.
Morality is a human behavior. It is in some ways analogous to trade or language: a structured social behavior that has developed in a way that often approximates particular mathematical patterns.
All of these can be investigated both empirically and intellectually: you can go out and record what people actually do, and draw conclusions from it; or you can reason from first principles about what sorts of patterns are mathematically possible; or both. For instance, you could investigate trade either beginning from the histories of actual markets, or from principles of microeconomics. You could investigate language beginning from linguistic corpora and historical linguistics ("What sorts of language do people actually use? How do they use it?"); or from formal language theory, parsing, generative grammar, etc. ("What sorts of language are possible?")
Some of the intellectual investigation of possible moralities we call "game theory"; others, somewhat less mathematical but more checked against moral intuition, "metaethics".
Asking whether there are universal, objective moral principles is a little like asking whether there are universal, objective p...
In summary of my own current position (and which I keep wanting to make a fuller post thereof):
If factual reality F can represent a function F(M) -> M from moral instructions to moral instructions (e.g. given the fact that burning people hurts them, F("it's wrong to hurt people")-> "It's wrong to burn people"), then there may exist universal moral attractors for our given reality -- these would represent objective moralities that are true for a vast set of different moral starting positions. Much like you reach the Sierpinski T...
...There seems to be some confusion - when I say "an objective morality capable of being scientifically investigated (a la Sam Harris or others)" - I do NOT mean something like a "one true, universal, metaphysical morality for all mind-designs" like the Socratic/Platonic Form of Good or any such nonsense. I just mean something in reality that's mind-independent - in the sense that it is hard-wired, e.g. by evolution, and thus independent/prior to any later knowledge or cognitive content - and thus can be investigated scientifically. It is
There seems to be some confusion - when I say "an objective morality capable of being scientifically investigated (a la Sam Harris or others)" - I do NOT mean something like a "one true, universal, metaphysical morality for all mind-designs" like the Socratic/Platonic Form of Good or any such nonsense. I just mean something in reality that's mind-independent - in the sense that it is hard-wired, e.g. by evolution, and thus independent/prior to any later knowledge or cognitive content - and thus can be investigated scientifically
I thi...
If Euthyphro's dilemma proves religious morality to be false, it also does the same to evolutionary morality: http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2009/02/euthyphro-and-evolutionary-ethics.html
Reading your edit... I believe that there exists some X such that X developed through natural selection, X does not depend on any particular knowledge, X can be investigated scientifically, and for any moral intuition M possessed by a human in the real world, there's a high probability that M depends on X such that if X did not exist, M would not exist either. (Which is not to say that X is the sole cause of M, or that two intuitions M1 and M2 can't both derive from X such that M1 and M2 motivate mutually exclusive judgments in certain real-world situation...
Well, an awful lot of what we think of as morality is dictated, ultimately, by game theory. Which is pretty universal, as far as I can tell. Rational-as-in-winning agents will tend to favor tit-for-tat strategies, from which much of morality can be systematically derived.
Objective morality? Yes, in the sense that game theory is objective. No, in the sense that payoff matrices are subjective.
I believe it is poosible to scientifically determine whether people generally have many and strong reasons to promote or inhibit certain desires through the use of social tools such as praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. I also believe that this investigation would make sense of a wealth of moral practices such as the three categories of action (obligation, prohibition, and non-obligatory permission), excuse, the four categories of culpability (intentional, knowing, reckless, negligent), supererogatory action, and. - of course - the role of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment.
I agree with what seems to be the standard viewpoint here: the laws of morality are not written on the fabric of the universe, but human behavior does follow certain trends, and by analyzing these trends we can extract some descriptive rules that could be called morals.
I would find such an analysis interesting, because it'd provide insight into how people work. Personally, though, I'm only interested in what is, and I don't care at all about what "ought to be". In that sense, I suppose I'm a moral nihilist. The LessWrong obsession with develop...
I suspect that there exists an objective morality capable of being investigated, but not using the methods commonly known as science.
What we currently think of as objective knowledge comes from one of two methods:
1) Start with self-evident axioms and apply logical rules of inference. The knowledge obtained from this method is called "mathematics".
2) The method commonly called the "scientific method". Note that thanks to the problem of induction the knowledge obtained using this method can never satisfy method 1's criterion for knowled...
I'd be extremely surprised if there turned out to be some Platonic ideal of a moral system that we can compare against. But it seems fairly clear to me that the moral systems we adopt influence factors which can be objectively investigated, i.e. happiness in individuals (however defined) or stability in societies, and that moral systems can be productively thought of as commensurable with each other along these axes. Since some aspects of our emotional responses are almost certainly innate, it also seems clear to me that the observable qualities of moral...
Until a few days ago I would have said I'm a nihilist, even though a few days ago I didn't know that was the label for someone who didn't believe that moral statements could be objective facts.
Now I would say a hearty "I don't know" and assign almost a 50:50 chance that there are objective moral "ought" statements.
Then in the last few days I was reminded that 1) scientific "objective facts" are generally dependent on unprovable assumptions, like the utiliity of induction, and the idea that what a few electrons did last thu...
Objective morality is like real magic - people who want real magic just aren't satisfied with the magic that's real.
Moral relativism all the way. I mean something by morality, but it might not be exactly the same as what you mean.
Of course, moral relativism doesn't single out anything (like changing other people) that you shouldn't do, contrary to occasional usage - it just means you're doing so for your own reasons.
Nor does it mean that humans can't share pretty much all their algorithms for finding goals, due to a common heritage. And this would make humans capable of remarkable agreement about morality. But to call that an objective morality would be stretching it.
The capability to be scientifically investigated is entirely divorced from the existence or discoverability of the thing scientifically investigated. We can devote billions of years and dollars in searching for things that do not and never did and never will exist. If investigation guaranteed existence, I'd investigate a winning lottery ticket in my wallet twice a day.
"Might is Right" is a morality in which there is no distinction between is and ought.
Natural selection favours some moralities more than other. The ones we see are those that thrive. Moral relativism mostly appears to ignore such effects.
I do not like the word "morality". It is very ambiguously defined. The only version of morality that I even remotely agree with is consequentialism/utilitarianism. I can't find compelling arguments for why other people should think this way though, and I think morality ultimately comes down to people arguing about their different terminal values, which is always pointless.
a creator would be most concerned about the continuing existence of protoplasm over the changing situations it would incur over the millennia. For the non-thinking organisms ecological effects would predominate. Sociological precepts would influence the evolution of apparent morality then idealized by the religious and the philosophical. a scientific study of morality would involve correlations between anticipated historical outcomes and societal values.
Its lunchtime so for fun I will answer some of your rhetorical questions.
Evolutionary Biology might be good at telling us what we value. However, as GE Moore pointed out, ethics is about what we SHOULD value.
Unless GE Moore is either an alien or an artificial intelligence, he is telling us what we should value from a human brain that values things based on its evolution. How will he be able to make any value statement and tell you with a straight face that his valuing that thing has NOTHING to do with his evolution?
Besides, evolutionary ethics is incoherent. "I have evolved a disposition to harm people like you; therefore, you deserve to be harmed." How does a person deserve punishment just because somebody else evolved a disposition to punish him.
My disposition to harm people is triggered approximately proportionally to my judgement that this person has or will harm me or someone I care about. My disposition doesn't speak, but neither does my disposition to presume based on experience that the sun will rise tomorrow. What does speak says about the second that being able to predict the future based on the past is an incredibly effective way to understand the universe, so much so that it seems the niverse's continuity from the past to the future is a feature of the universe, not just a feature of the tools my mind has developed to understand the universe. About my incoherent disposition to harm someone who is threatening my wife or my sister, I would invite you to consider life in a society where this disposition did not exist. Violent thieves would run roughshod over the non-violent, who would stand around naked, starving, and puzzled: "what can we do about this after all?"
Do we solve the question of gay marriage by determining whether the accusers actually have a genetic disposition to kill homosexuals? And if we discover they do, we leap to the conclusion that homosexuals DESERVE to be killed?
This sentence seems somewhat incoherent but I'll address what I think are some of the interesting issues it evokes, if not quite brings up.
First, public open acceptance of homosexuality is a gigantic and modern phenomenon. If nothing else, it proves that an incredibly large number of humans DO NOT have any such genetic urge to kill homosexuals, or even to give them dirty looks when walking by them on the street for that matter. So if there is a lesson about concluding moral "oughts" from moral "is-es" here, it is that anybody who previously conclude that homicidal hatred of homosexuals was part of human genetic moral makeup was using insanely flawed methods for understanding genetic morality.
I would say that all attempts to derive ought from is, to design sensible rules for humans living and working together, should be approached with a great deal of caution and humility, especially given the clear tendency towards erroneous conclusions that may also be in our genes. But I would also say that any attempt at determining useful and valuable rules for living and working together which completely ignores what we might learn from evolutionary morality is "wrong" to do so, that any additional human suffering that occurs because these people willfully ignore useful scientific facts is blood on their hands.
What is this practice of praise and condemnation that is central to morality? Of deserved praise and condemnation? Does it make sense to punish somebody for having the wrong genes?
Well, it makes sense to restrict the freedom of anybody who does more social harm than social good if left unrestrained. It doesn't matter whether the reason is bad genes or some other reason. We shoot a lion who is loose and killing suburbanites. You don't have to call it punishment, but what if you do? It is still a gigantically sensible and useful thing to do.
Many genes produce tendencies in people that are moderated by feedback from the world. I have a tendency to be really good at linear algebra and math and building electronic things that work. Without education this might have gone unnoticed. Without positive accolades, I might have preferred to play the electric guitar. Perhaps someone who has a tendency to pick up things he likes and keep them, or to strike out at people who piss him off, will have behavior which is also moderated by his genes AND his environment. Perhaps training him to get along with other people will be the difference between an incarcerated petty thief and a talented corporate raider or linebacker.
The thing that is central to morality is inducing moral behavior. Praise and condemnation are not central, they are two techniques which may or may not help meet that end, and given the fact that they have been enhanced by evolution, I'm guessing they actually do work in a lot of circumstances.
What, according to evolutionary ethics, is the role of moral argument?
Moral argment writ small is a band of humans hashing out how they will get along running on the savannah. This has probably been going on long enough to be evolutionarily meaningful. How do we share the meat and the furs from the animal we cooperatively killed? Who gets to have sex with whom, and how do we change that result to something we like better? What do we do about that guy who keeps pooping in the water supply? The evidence that "talking about it" is useful is the incredibly high level of cooperative organization that humans demonstrate as compared to any other animal. Social insects are the only creatures I know of that even come close, and their high levels of organizations took 10s or 100s of thousands of years to refine, while the productivity of the human corporation or anything we have using a steam engine or a transistor has all been accomplished in 100 years or so.
Does genetics actually explain such things as the end of slavery, and a woman's right to vote? Those are very fast genetic changes.
Does genetics explain an artificial heart? The 4 minute mile? Walking on the moon without dying? The heart is evolved, as is our ability to run, and our need to breathe and for gravity. Without knowing what the answer exactly is, these non-moral and very recent examples bear a similar relationship to our genetics as do the recent moral examples in the question. Sorry to not answer this one, except by tangent.
Because values are not genetically determined, there is a realm in which it is sensible to ask about what we should value, which is a question that evolutionary ethics cannot answer.
What can answer it if evolutionary ethics cannot? A science fiction story like Jesus, Moses, or Scientology that everybody decides to pretend is a morally relevant truth?
ALL your moral questioning and intuitions about right and wrong, about the ability or lack of it for evolutionary investigations to provide answers, it seems to me it is all coming from your evolved brain interacting with the world. Which is what the brain evolved to do. By what reasoning are you able to separate your moral intuitions, which you seem to think are useful for evolving your moral values, from the moral intuitions your evolved brain makes?
Are you under the impression that it is the moral CONCLUSIONS that are evolved? It is not. The brain is a mechanism, some sort of information processor. Evolution occurs when a processor of one type outcompetes a processor of another type. The detailed moral conclusions reached by the mechanism that evolved are just that: new results coming from an old machine from some mixture of inputs, some of which are novel and some of which are same-old-same-old.
Praise and condemnation are central to our moral life precisely because these are the tools for shaping learned desires - resulting in an institution where the question of the difference between right and wrong is the question of the difference between what we should and should not praise or condemn.
And you think this is somehow an alternative to an evolutionary explanation? Go watch the neurobiologists sussing out all the different ways that learning takes place in brains and see if you can tell me where the evolutionary part stopped, because to me it looked like learning algorithms are just beautifully evolved with a compactness which is exceptional, and still unduplicated in silicon, which is millions of times faster than brains.
That was fun. Lunch is over. Back to writing android apps.
Do you believe in an objective morality capable of being scientifically investigated (a la Sam Harris *or others*), or are you a moral nihilist/relativist? There seems to be some division on this point. I would have thought Less Wrong to be well in the former camp.
Edit: There seems to be some confusion - when I say "an objective morality capable of being scientifically investigated (a la Sam Harris *or others*)" - I do NOT mean something like a "one true, universal, metaphysical morality for all mind-designs" like the Socratic/Platonic Form of Good or any such nonsense. I just mean something in reality that's mind-independent - in the sense that it is hard-wired, e.g. by evolution, and thus independent/prior to any later knowledge or cognitive content - and thus can be investigated scientifically. It is a definite "is" from which we can make true "ought" statements relative to that "is". See drethelin's comment and my analysis of Clippy.