PhilGoetz comments on Homogeneity vs. heterogeneity (or, What kind of sex is most moral?) - Less Wrong
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I rewrote it to spell it out in tedious detail.
Could you spell out in even more tedious detail what you mean by the following?
The obvious interpretation of this sentence seems to commit the naturalistic fallacy; is there another meaning that I'm missing?
As near as I can tell from your link, this Naturalistic Fallacy means disagreeing with G. E. Moore's position that "good" cannot be defined in natural terms. It seems to be a powerful debating trick to convince people that disagreeing with you is a fallacy.
Further, Phil's statement does not even define "good", it describes how people define "good". It is not a fallacy to describe a behavior that commits a fallacy.
I wonder, would you have realized these issues yourself, if you had tried to explain how the fallacy applies to the statement? Or would it have helped me to realize that you meant something else, and there is indeed a problem here?
Apologies, I should have made it clearer that I was referring to the naturalistic fallacy in it's casual sense, which denies the validity of drawing moral conclusions directly from natural facts. (I assumed that this usage was common enough that I didn't need to spell it out; that assumption was clearly false.)
Pace your second paragraph, it seemed to me that Phil was trying to do this, and others seem to have interpreted the post in this way too. But I admit that part of the vagueness in my phrasing was due to the fact that I was (and still am) having trouble figuring out exactly what Phil is trying to say.
Ah, it might have helped to instead call it the more specific Appeal to Nature, one of several usages discussed in the article you referenced. Even so, I don't think Phil was drawing moral conclusions directly from natural facts. He was saying, given these natural facts, this behavior works, and it is the fact that it works that causes people to call it moral. The position seems to be Consequentialism as an explanation for other people's behavior.
As I interpreted the article, Phil is saying that, however much we frame our moral thinking and discussion in terms of abstract ethics, ultimately our conclusions are determined by natural facts about us and our society, that is, we somehow decide the moral thing is what works, even if that is not our explicit reasoning. This sets up the question that, if we are in a situation to determine the natural facts that force our ethics, is there in fact a higher ethical principle such that we should fix our nature to fit that ethical principal? And does this conflict with other goals?
You are right, it would have been better to cite Appeal to Nature. But I insist that Phil did commit this fallacy. Quoted from his longer comment in this thread:
What if he had said:
Would that have committed the fallacy? Would it still support his point? Should we, because Phil committed this fallacy in answering a question about his article, discard the whole article?
Also note, Phil does not seem to have any problem with a person denying their nature to increase their fitness.
I'm not sure I understand your altered Phil quote either: "What if he had said..." If I do understand it, we still disagree. It'd be helpful if you answered your own questions. Here are a few for you.
Do you believe it is morally good to take actions which increase our fitness?
Do you think it is sometimes/always bad to take actions which decrease our fitness?
Do you take fitness to have terminal or intrinsic moral value?
My answers: "Not necessarily," "Sometimes," and "No."
I'll try to answer your questions tomorrow, but I'll have to be asking for clarification.
I intrinsically value my experience of life, and to the extent that it causes others to have life experiences that they similarly value, I find that my fitness has instrumental value. (Though I tend to value memetic fitness over genetic fitness.)
People instinctively have values that promote genetic fitness (though most don't value genetic fitness itself). One should consider if a loss of genetic fitness reflects a loss to one of these values.
The modified quote does not Appeal to Nature (or if it does, Appealing to Nature is not always wrong). That a behavioral restriction reduces fitness is a reasonable red flag that it may be reducing the person's actual utility, and I don't think it is controversial that you should not do arbitrarily. The compelling reason may be that the loss of fitness has nothing to do with anything the person values, but it does promote something else that really is valued. But it is not wrong to desire an explicit reason for changing one's behavior. Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement.
I think that both the modified and original quote are really a side point to the issue Phil was discussing. What might be more pertinent is that a moral system, whether it is good or not, that causes its followers to decrease their fitness, will be "punished" in that it will become less common than moral systems that promote fitness. This nicely supports the idea that we could promote a good moral system, if we identified one, if we could fix certain parameters so that morality does increase fitness.
And no, we should not dismiss an article because its author made a mistake in answering a question about it. If no one is able to address an objection to a critical part of the article, then we should consider dismissing it.
I find the response of the LW community schizophrenic. If someone writes a post advocating moral realism, they get jumped on for being religious. Yet when I wrote this post asking whether there is some evolution-free moral code that should influence the choices of organism-designers, I got jumped on for even presenting as one possibility that moral realism might be false.
Claiming that the "naturalistic fallacy" is a fallacy is, I think, identical to defending moral realism. You can't even define the naturalistic fallacy without presuming moral realism.
Your post was poorly received because it tackled a confusing topic, and failed to bring clarity. All of the supposed counter-arguments are just confabulations. I expect Less Wrongers to jump on any attempt to analyze morality in abstract terms, regardless of its conclusion, because there's an extensive body of philosophical literature showing that such attempts produce only concentrated confusion.
Also, you shouldn't expect different individuals within a community to all advocate consistent positions. If they did, that would mean that either the question was an easy one and not worthy of further discussion, or the community was broken and suffering from groupthink.
I agree with jimrandomh. One should expect different people to have different opinions. Furthermore, we're most likely to respond to things that we find obviously wrong - thus, where the community is not in consensus, expect to be 'jumped on' no matter which position you advocate.
-a moral realist of sorts
The "tedious" detail makes your point clearer.
Though your linked resources for Exploration and Exploitation don't help much. One keeps giving me page load errors, and the other appears to be a symposium description and schedule. We have had some discussion of the concept here on LW. And maybe it would help to add an inline explanation that it is the issue of trading off between strategies that are known to work well, and trying other strategies to find out how well they work.