Pigliucci's comment on Yudkowsky's and Dai's stance on morality and logic

mapnoterritory

So morality has a lot to do with logic — indeed I have argued that moral reasoning is a type of applied logical reasoning — but it is not logic “all the way down,” it is anchored by certain contingent facts about humanity, bonoboness and so forth.

But, despite Yudkowsky’s confident claim, morality isn’t a matter of logic “all the way down,” because it has to start with some axioms, some brute facts about the type of organisms that engage in moral reasoning to begin with. Those facts don’t come from physics (though, like everything else, they better be compatible with all the laws of physics), they come from biology. A reasonable theory of ethics, then, can emerge only from a combination of biology (by which I mean not just evolutionary biology, but also cultural evolution) and logic.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.de/2013/01/lesswrong-on-morality-and-logic.html

Pigliucci:

So morality has a lot to do with logic — indeed I have argued that moral reasoning is a type of applied logical reasoning — but it is not logic “all the way down,” it is anchored by certain contingent facts about humanity, bonoboness and so forth.

But, despite Yudkowsky’s confident claim, morality isn’t a matter of logic “all the way down,” because it has to start with some axioms, some brute facts about the type of organisms that engage in moral reasoning to begin with. Those facts don’t come from physics (though, like everything else, they better be compatible with all the laws of physics), they come from biology. A reasonable theory of ethics, then, can emerge only from a combination of biology (by which I mean not just evolutionary biology, but also cultural evolution) and logic.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.de/2013/01/lesswrong-on-morality-and-logic.html

You're probably right about the subjective/relative thing. He admits that things like this are contextually based while being marxist enough to say that the context itself doesn't matter, only that the logic is able to work within it.

Ethics are inherently logical, not physical. Obviously you can't shoot it but you can disprove their value easily enough by attacking what they're contingent on. Not all logic is created equal, and don't bring evolution into it. You can just as easily say that this is the common belief imprinted onto us by society only because the masters society us to be more easy to rule. Considering many other things, this is probably the case.

I don't understand most of what you're saying.

You've said that according to [Qiaochu_Yuan] ethics is contextually based, although context itself doesn't matter.

In the last comment, you seemed to agree with the gist of the idea.

Ethics are inherently logical, not physical.

In your earlier comment, you said

But in this article I'm pretty sure he was addressing the commonly agreed upon 'most good for the most people' morality

The word 'but' sounded like a counter-argument. I don't see the counter argument. If you have found a problem with what Qiaochu_Yu... (read more)