Where I still take issue is that even if we know, generally speaking, "how people actually make moral decisions in practice", or "where moral intuitions come from," that does not add up to what a philosophical study of ethics is supposed to give us, which is more like: what moral decisions people ought to make, or, how people's moral intuitions ought to be refined (through argumentation, say).
I don't think Luke would disagree with this statement either. That's why the replacement for intuitionist moral philosophy isn't just moral psychology, it's "moral psychology, decision theory, and game theory." You seem to be reading more into Luke's suggestions than is there.
Are you suggesting that mentioning that political theory is part of philosophy is against the 'agreement on LW' and so should not be discussed? Or that Luke has chosen not to bring up this aspect of philosophy so as to avoid bringing up politics?
Probably the latter. It might be worth mentioning that the philosophical interests of many LWers are aimed towards artificial intelligence, and in some scenarios where the kind of philosophizing that LW people do would pay off, political theory seems irrelevant (a singleton, for example), or at least is much less relevant than a theory of ethics precise enough that you can code it into an artificial intelligence.
By 'naturalized cognitivist worldview' I mean the worldview that holds all the pertinent phenomena to be 'natural' in the sense of being discernable by physical sciences, with an emphasis on those phenomena that are part of cognitive systems. Often this comes with the idea that the most pertinent unit of analysis when studying society is the individual cognitive agent or internal processes therein.
I don't see what the latter has to do with the former. As you say, the latter point of view doesn't seem well-suited to understanding society at large. That has nothing to do with the validity of the former point of view (which I assume is being held in opposition to worldviews that allow epiphenomena).
I don't mean anything specific by 'transpersonal phenomena,' but I guess I'm trying to broadly indicate phenomena that are not bounded to an individual's cognitive apparatus.
I don't see why this isn't reducible to a naturalized cognitivist worldview. Instead of one mind you study a collection of minds.
That's why the replacement for intuitionist moral philosophy isn't just moral psychology, it's "moral psychology, decision theory, and game theory." You seem to be reading more into Luke's suggestions than is there.
I addressed decision theory in my original comment. "And replacing ethics with decision theory would be sidestepping the metaethical question about the legitimacy of consequentialism."
I think that the replacement would implicitly make a few ethical and metaethical assumptions that are a matter of legitimate debate within a...
Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
I've complained before that philosophy is a diseased discipline which spends far too much of its time debating definitions, ignoring relevant scientific results, and endlessly re-interpreting old dead guys who didn't know the slightest bit of 20th century science. Is that still the case?
You bet. There's some good philosophy out there, but much of it is bad enough to make CMU philosopher Clark Glymour suggest that on tight university budgets, philosophy departments could be defunded unless their work is useful to (cited by) scientists and engineers — just as his own work on causal Bayes nets is now widely used in artificial intelligence and other fields.
How did philosophy get this way? Russell's hypothesis is not too shabby. Check the syllabi of the undergraduate "intro to philosophy" classes at the world's top 5 U.S. philosophy departments — NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, Michigan Ann Arbor, and Harvard — and you'll find that they spend a lot of time with (1) old dead guys who were wrong about almost everything because they knew nothing of modern logic, probability theory, or science, and with (2) 20th century philosophers who were way too enamored with cogsci-ignorant armchair philosophy. (I say more about the reasons for philosophy's degenerate state here.)
As the CEO of a philosophy/math/compsci research institute, I think many philosophical problems are important. But the field of philosophy doesn't seem to be very good at answering them. What can we do?
Why, come up with better philosophical methods, of course!
Scientific methods have improved over time, and so can philosophical methods. Here is the first of my recommendations...
More Pearl and Kahneman, less Plato and Kant
Philosophical training should begin with the latest and greatest formal methods ("Pearl" for the probabilistic graphical models made famous in Pearl 1988), and the latest and greatest science ("Kahneman" for the science of human reasoning reviewed in Kahneman 2011). Beginning with Plato and Kant (and company), as most universities do today, both (1) filters for inexact thinkers, as Russell suggested, and (2) teaches people to have too much respect for failed philosophical methods that are out of touch with 20th century breakthroughs in math and science.
So, I recommend we teach young philosophy students:
(In other words: train philosophy students like they do at CMU, but even "more so.")
So, my own "intro to philosophy" mega-course might be guided by the following core readings:
(There are many prerequisites to these, of course. I think philosophy should be a Highly Advanced subject of study that requires lots of prior training in maths and the sciences, like string theory but hopefully more productive.)
Once students are equipped with some of the latest math and science, then let them tackle The Big Questions. I bet they'd get farther than those raised on Plato and Kant instead.
You might also let them read 20th century analytic philosophy at that point — hopefully their training will have inoculated them from picking up bad thinking habits.
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