How does morality get it's ability to be rationally binding? If the very definition of "rationality" includes being moral, is that mere wordplay? Why should we accept this definition of rationality and not a different one?
Also see Peter Singer's The Triviality of the Debate Over 'Is-Ought' and the Definition of 'Moral'. In short, a justification of moral prescriptions comes back to an explanation of why you should care about those moral prescriptions. Or on LW: The Moral Void.
A killer quote from Singer's paper:
Disputes over the definition of morality and over the "is-ought" problem are disputes over words which raise no really significant issues. [Of course,] lack of clarity about the meaning of words is an important source of error, both in philosophy and in practical argument… My complaint is that what should be regarded as something to be got out of the way in the introduction to a work of moral philosophy has become the subject matter of almost the whole of moral philosophy...
Now that I think about it, I'm going to make that the new epigraph for Pluralistic Moral Reductionism.
By the definitions above, I'm a unitary but not an absolutism theorist. I would describe rationally binding constraints as those that govern prudence, not morality; one can be perfectly prudent without being moral (indeed, if one does not have morality among one's priorities, perfect prudence could require immorality). A brief sketch of my moral theory can be found here.
Why is there only one particular morality?
What would it mean for there to be several? I think morality drops out of personhood. It's possible that other things drop out of personhoo...
Why is there only one particular morality?
I think the standard LW argument for there being only one morality is based on the psychological unity of mankind. Human minds do not occupy an arbitrary or even a particularly large region of mindspace: the region they occupy is quite small for good reasons. Likewise, the moral theories that human minds adopt occupy quite a small region of moralityspace. The arguments around CEV suggest that these moral theories ought to converge if we extrapolate enough. I am not sure if this exact argument is defended in a LW...
the region they occupy is quite small for good reasons.
The region is exactly as large as it is. The fact that is has size, and is not a single point, tells you that our moralities are different. In some things, the difference will not matter, and in some it will. It seems we don't have any problem finding things to fight over. However small you want to say that the differences are, there's a lot of conflict over them.
The more I look around, the more I see people with fundamentally different ways of thinking and valuing. Now I suppose they have more commonality between them and banana slugs, and likely they would band together should the banana slugs rise up and launch a sneak attack. But these different kinds of people with different values often don't seem to want to live in the same world.
Hitchens writes in Newsweek magazine: “Winston Churchill ... found it intolerable even to breathe the same air, or share the same continent or planet, as the Nazis.”
(By the way, if anyone can find the original source from Churchill, I'd appreciate it.)
I'd also note that even having contextually identical moralities doesn't imply a lack of conflict. We could all be psychopaths. Some percentag...
I will answer by explaining my view of morally realist ethics.
Conscious experiences and their content are physical occurrences and real. They can vary from the world they represent, but they are still real occurrences. Their reality can be known with the highest possible certainty, above all else, including physics, because they are immediately and directly accessible, while the external world is accessible indirectly.
Unlike the physical world, it seems that physical conscious perceptions can theoretically be anything. The content of conscious perceptions ...
This goes right to the core of unitary theory -- that there is only one true theory of morality. But I must admit I'm dumbfounded at how any one particular theory of morality could be "the one true one", except in so far as someone personally chooses that theory over others based on preferences and desires.
Think of morality, not as solipsistically fulfilling personal desires, but as a means of resolving conflicts between desires (within groups). Why would it then be impossible for it there to be an optimal way (amongst groups) of doing so?
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I'm dumbfounded at how any one particular theory of morality could be "the one true one", except in so far as someone personally chooses that theory over others based on preferences and desires.
Great, we agree, let's choose based on preferences and desires :P
Are moral facts contingent; could morality have been different?
What people say and do could have been different, so when using "morality" descriptively, like "people could have different moralities," then sure. But "morality the referent," the algorithm ...
I lean strongly toward unitary theory, with two caveats. First, not all specific moral statements need be true or false; some can have the middle truth-value (or no truth-value if you prefer to say that). Second, unitary-ness is not a logical truth - if true, it's a consequence of the attitudes people actually have and the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Why is there only one particular morality? Because people keep insisting on talking about it. We keep finding that, like Churchill, we prefer "jaw, jaw" to "war, war". We ...
My meta-ethics are basically that of Luke's Pluralistic Moral Reductionism. (UPDATE: Elaborated in my Meta-ethics FAQ.)
However, I was curious as to whether this "Pluralistic Moral Reductionism" counts as moral realism or anti-realism. Luke's essay says it depends on what I mean by "moral realism". I see moral realism as broken down into three separate axes:
There's success theory, the part that I accept, which states that moral statements like "murder is wrong" do successfully refer to something real (in this case, a particular moral standard, like utilitarianism -- "murder is wrong" refers to "murder does not maximize happiness").
There's unitary theory, which I reject, that states there is only one "true" moral standard rather than hundreds of possible ones.
And then there's absolutism theory, which I reject, that states that the one true morality is rationally binding.
I don't know how many moral realists are on LessWrong, but I have a few questions for people who accept moral realism, especially unitary theory or absolutism theory. These are "generally seeking understanding and opposing points of view" kind of questions, not stumper questions designed to disprove or anything. While I'm doing some more reading on the topic, if you're into moral realism, you could help me out by sharing your perspective.
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This goes right to the core of unitary theory -- that there is only one true theory of morality. But I must admit I'm dumbfounded at how any one particular theory of morality could be "the one true one", except in so far as someone personally chooses that theory over others based on preferences and desires.
So why is there only one particular morality? And what is the one true theory of morality? What makes this theory the one true one rather than others? How do we know there is only one particular theory? What's inadequate about all the other candidates?
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This gets me a bit more background knowledge, but what is the ontology of morality? Some concepts of moral realism have an idea of a "moral realm", while others reject this as needlessly queer and spooky. But essentially, what is grounding morality? Are moral facts contingent; could morality have been different? Is it possible to make it different in the future?
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I see rationality as talking about what best satisfies your pre-existing desires. But it's entirely possible that morality isn't desirable by someone at all. While I hope that society is prepared to coerce them into moral behavior (either through social or legal force), I don't think that their immoral behavior is necessarily irrational. And on some accounts, morality is independent of desire but still has rational force.
How does morality get it's ability to be rationally binding? If the very definition of "rationality" includes being moral, is that mere wordplay? Why should we accept this definition of rationality and not a different one?
I look forward to engaging in diologue with some moral realists. Same with moral anti-realists, I guess. After all, if moral realism is true, I want to know.