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Wei_Dai comments on Morality Isn't Logical - Less Wrong
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Every act of lying is morally prohibited / This act would be a lie // This act is morally prohibited.
So here I have a bit of moral reasoning, the conclusion of which follows from the premises. The argument is valid, so if the premises are true, the conclusion can be considered proven. So given that I can give you valid proofs for moral conclusions, in what way is morality not logical?
The above example of moral reasoning (assume for the sake of simplicity that this is my entire moral system) is consistant, and valid, and (if you accept the premises) sound. Anyone who accepts the premises must accept the conclusion. One might waver on acceptance of the premises (this is true for every subject) but the conclusion follows from them regardless of what one's mood is.
All that said, our moral reasoning is often fraught. But I don't think makes morality peculiar. The mistakes we often make with regard to moral reasoning don't seem to be different in kind from the mistakes we make in, say, economics. Ethics, they say, is not an exact science.
I should have given some examples of the kind of moral reasoning I'm referring to.
1st link is ambiguity aversion.
Morality is commonly taken to describe what one will actually do when they are trading off private gains vs other people's losses. See this as example of moral judgement. Suppose Roberts is smarter. He will quickly see that he can donate 10% to charity, and it'll take longer for him to reason about value of cash that was not given to him (reasoning that may stop him from pressing the button), so there will be a transient during which he pushes the button, unless he somehow suppresses actions during transients. It's an open ended problem 'unlike logic' because consequences are difficult to evaluate.
edit: been in a hurry.
Ah, thank you, that is helpful.
In the case of 'circular altruism', I confess I'm quite at a loss. I've never really managed to pull an argument out of there. But if we're just talking about the practice of quantifying goods in moral judgements, then I agree with you there's no strongly complete ethical calculus that's going to do render ethics a mathematical science. But in at least in 'circular reasoning' EY doesn't need quite so strong a view: so far as I can tell, he's just saying that our moral passions conflict with our reflective moral judgements. And even if we don't have a strongly complete moral system, we can make logically coherent reflective moral judgements. I'd go so far as to say we can make logically coherent reflective literary criticism judgements. Logic isn't picky.
So while, on the one hand, I'm also (as yet) unconvinced about EY's ethics, I think it goes too far in the opposite direction to say that ethical reasoning is inherently fuzzy or illogical. Valid arguments are valid arguments, regardless.