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Juno_Watt comments on Privileging the Question - Less Wrong
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Comments (311)
People use feelings/System1 to do morality. That doesn't make it an oracle. Thinking might be more accurate.
If you don't know how to solve a problem, you guess. But that doens't mean anything goes. Would anyone include rocks in the Circle? Probably not, since they don't have feelings, values, or preferences. So there seem to be some constraints.
Accurate? How can you speak of a moral preference being "accurate" or not? Moral preferences simply are. There are some meta-ethics sequences here that explain the arbitrariness of our moral preferences more eloquently , and here is a fun story that tangentially illustrates it
I bet I can find you someone who would say that burning the Quran or the Bible is inherently immoral.
We sometimes extend morality to inanimate objects , but only ones that mean something to us, such as works of art and religious artefacts. That isn't actually inherent because of the "to us" clause, although some people might claim that it is.
Pebble sorting is a preference. That's it. I don't have to believe it is a moral preference or a correct moral preference.
Moral objectivism isn't obviously wrong, and system 2 isn't obviously the wrong way to realise moral truths. IOW, moral subjectivism isn't obviously true.
NB: Objectivism isn't universalism.
Beliefs simply are. And some are true and some are not. You seem to be assuming the non-existence of anything that could verify or disprove a moral preference in order to prove more or less the same thing.
I would say that the "to us" clause actually applies to everything, and that nothing is "inherent", as you put it. Pebble sorting means something to the pebble sorters. Humans mean something to me. The entirity of morality boils down to what is important "to us"?
To me, moral objectivism is obviously wrong and subjectivism is obviously true, and this is embedded in my definition of morality. I'm actually unsure how anyone could think of it in any other coherent way.
I think it's time to unpack "morality". I think morality is feelings produced in the human mind about how people aught to act. That is, I think "murder is bad" is in some ways analogous to "Brussels sprouts are gross". From this definition, it follows that I see moral objectivism as obviously wrong - akin to saying, "no man, Brussels sprouts are objectively, inherently gross! In the same way that the sky is objectively blue! / In the same way that tautologies are true!" (Actually, replace blue with the appropriate wavelengths to avoid arguments about perception)
What do you think "morality" is, and where do you suppose it comes from?
I think morality is behaving so as to take into account the values and preferences of others as well as ones own. You can succed or fail in that, hence "accurate".
Morality may manifest in the form of a feeling for many people, but not for everybody and not all feelings are equal. So I don't think that is inherent, or definitional.
I don't think the sprout analogy works, because your feeling that you don't like sprouts doesn't seriously affect others, but the psychoaths fondndess for murder does.
The feelings that are relevant to morality are the empathic ones, not personal preferences. That is a clue that morality is about behaving so as to take into account the values and preferences of others as well as ones own.
if you think morlaity is the same as a personal preference...what makes it morality? Why don't we just have one word and one way of thinking?
Because they feel different to us from the inside - for the same reason that we separate "thinking" and "feeling" even though in the grand scheme of things they are both ways to influence behavior.
In Math, empirical evidence is replaced by axioms. In Science, the axioms are the empirical evidence.
The point is that all rational agents will converge upon mathematical statements, and will not converge upon moral statements. Do you disagree?
I'm very, very sure that my morality doesn't work that way.
Imagine you lived on a world with two major factions, A and B.
A has a population of 999999. B has a population of 1000.
Every individual in A has a very mild preference for horrifically torturing B, and the motivation is sadism and hatred. The torture and slow murder of B is a bonding activity for A, and the shared hatred keeps the society cohesive.
Every individual in B has a strong, strong preference not to be tortured, but it doesn't even begin to outweigh the collective preferences of A.
From the standpoint of preference utilitarianism, this scenario is analogous to Torture vs. Dust Specks. Preference Utilitarians choose torture, and a good case could be made even under good old human morality to choose torture as the lesser of two evils. This is a problem which I'd give serious weight to choosing torture
Preference utilitarian agents would let A torture B - "shut up and multiply". However, from the standpoint of my human morality, this scenario is very different from torture vs. dust specks, and I wouldn't even waste a fraction of a second in deciding what is right in this scenario. Torture for the sake of malice is wrong (to me) and it really doesn't matter what everyone else's preferences are - if it's in my power, I'm not letting A torture B!
Morality evolved as a function of how it benefited single alleles, not societies. Under different conditions, it could have evolved differently. You can't generalize from the way morality works in humans to the way it might work in all possible societies of entities.
Agreement isn't important: arguments are important. You apparently made the argument that convergence on morality isn't possible because it would require empirically detectable moral objects. I made the counterargument that convergence on morality could work like convergence on mathematical truth. So it seems that convergence on morlaity could happen, since there is a way it could work.
OK. Utilitarianism sucks. That doens't mean other objective approaches don't work -- you could be a deontologist. And it doesn't mean subjectivism does work.
Says who? We can generalise language, maths and physics beyond our instinctive System I understandings. And we have.
is the reason why I said that my morality isn't preference utilitarian. If "taking into account the values and preferences of others as well as your own", then preference utilitarianism seems to be the default way to do that.
Alright...so if I'm understanding correctly, you are saying that moral facts exist and people can converge upon them independently, in the same ways that people will converge on mathematical facts. And I'm saying we can't, and that morality is a preference linked to emotions. Neither of us have really done anything but restate our positions here. My position seems more or less inherent in my definition of morality, and I think you understand my position...but I still don't understand yours.
Can I have a rudimentary definition of morality, an example of a moral fact, and a process by which two agents can converge upon it?
Can you give me a method of evaluating a moral fact which doesn't at some point refer to our instincts? Do moral facts necessarily have to conform to our instincts? As in, if I proved a moral fact to you, but your instincts said it was wrong, would you still accept that it was right?
For lexicographers, the default is apparently deontology
"conformity to the rules of right conduct"
"Principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior."
etc.
1 A means by which communities of entities with preferences act in accordance with all their preferences.
2 Murder is wrong.
3 Since agents do not wish to be murdered, it is in their interests to agree to refrain from murder under an arrangement in which other agents agree to refrain from removing them.
I don't see why I need to, Utilitarianism and ontology take preferences and intuitions into account. Your argument against utilitarinism that it comes to to conclusions which go against your instincts. That isn't just an assumption that morality has to something to do with instincts, it is a further assumption that your instincts trump all further constderations It is an assumption of subjectivism.
You are saying objectivism is false because subjectivism is true. If utilitarianism worked, it would take intuitions and preferences into account, and arrive at some arrangement that minimises the number of people who don't get their instincts or preferences satisfied. Some people have to lose You have decided that is unaccpetable because you have decided that you must not lose. But utilitariansim still works in the sense that a set of subjective prefefernces can be treated as objective facts, and aggregated together. There is nothing to stop different utilitarians (of the same variety) converging on a decision. U-ism "works" in that sense.You objection is not that convergence is not possible, but that what is converged upon is not moral, because your instincts say not.
But you don't have any argument beyond an assumption that morality just is what your instincts say. The other side of the argument doesn't have to deny the instinctive or subjective aspect of morality, it only needs to deny that your instincts are supreme. And it can argue that since morality is about the regulation of conduct amongst groups, the very notion of subjective morality is incoherent (parallel: language is all about communication, so a language that is only understood by one person is a paradox).
Maybe. Almost everybody who has had their mind changed about sexual conduct had overridden an instinct.
So there are several things I don't like about this..
0) It's not in their interests to play the cooperative strategy if they are more powerful, since the other agent can't remove them.
1) It's not a given that all agents do not wish to be murdered. It's only luck that we wish not to die. Sentient beings could just as easily have come out of insects who allow themselves to be eaten by mates, or by their offspring.
2) So you sidestep this, and say that this only applies to beings that wish to be murdered. Well now, this is utilitarianism. You'd essentially be saying that all agents want their preferences fulfilled, therefore we should all agree to fulfill each others preferences.
Essentially yes. But to rephrase: I know that the behavior of all agents (including myself) will work to bring about the agent's preferences to the best of the agent's ability, and this is true by definition of what a "preference" is.
I'm not sure I follow what you mean by this. My ideas about sexual conduct are in line with my instincts. A highly religious person's ideas about sexual conduct are in line with the instincts that society drilled into them. If I converted that person into sex-positivism, they would shed the societal conditioning and their morality and feelings would change. Who is not in alignment with their instincts?
(Instincts here means feelings with no rational basis, rather than genetically programmed or reflexive behaviors)
I think you've misunderstood the meta-ethics sequences, then, or I have, because
is quite similar to Eliezer's position. Although Juno_Watt may have reached it from another direction.
I read it as a warning about expecting sufficiently rational beings to automatically acquire human morality, in the same way that sufficiently rational beings would automatically acquire knowledge about true statements (science, etc). The lesson is that preferences (morality, etc) is different from fact.
If you want to know Eliezer's views, he spells them out explicitly here - although I think the person most famous for this view is Nietzsche (not that he's the first to have held this view).
To me, "No universally compelling arguments" means this - two rational agents will converge upon factual statements, but they need not converge upon preferences (moral or otherwise) because moral statements aren't "facts".
It really doesn't matter if you define the pebble sorting as a "moral" preference or a plain old preference.The point is, that humans have a morality module - but that module is in the brain and not a feature which is implicit in logical structures, nor is it a feature implicit in the universe itself.
I agree that is what it is trying to say, but...as you made illustrate above..it only appears to work if the reader is willing to bel fuzzy about the difference between preference and moral preference.
For some value of "explicit". He doesn't even restrict the range of agents to rational agents, and no-one expects irrationali agents to agree with each other, or rational ones.
Mathematical statements aren't empirical facts eitherl but convergence is uncontroversial there.
Are you quite sure that morlaity isn't implicit in the logic of how-a-society-if-entities-wth-varying-prefernces manage-to-rub-along ?
Juno Watt has read the sequences, but still doesn't know what Eliezer's position is.
Quite a few of them no doubt. Of course, the overwhelming majority of people who would say that burning the Quran or the Bible is inherently immoral would also say that it's immoral by virtue of the preferences of an entity that, on their view, is in fact capable of having preferences.
Of course, I'm sure I could find someone who would say rocks have feelings, values, and preferences.
I don't think this is an accurate formulation of the general religious attitude towards morality.
I agree. Do you also think it's a false statement?
Let's just say the expression "it's immoral by virtue of the preferences of an entity" is not actually a good 'translation' of the phrase they'd use.
Um... well, I'm not really sure what to do with that statement, but I'm happy to leave the topic there if you prefer.
Ok, maybe I misunderstood your question in the grandparent. Which statement was it referring to?
"the overwhelming majority of people who would say that burning the Quran or the Bible is inherently immoral would also say that it's immoral by virtue of the preferences of an entity that, on their view, is in fact capable of having preferences."
They'd phrase it in terms of sacredness, which isn't quite the same thing, e.g., how would you apply your argument to flag burning?
Conversationalists will want to preserve ecosystems, even where those ecosystems are already well studied by science, even when the ecosystem contains no sentient beings (plants, fungi, microbes), even when destroying the ecosystem has many advantages for humans, because they think the ecosystem is intrinsically valuable independently of the effect on beings with feelings, values, and preferences.
Some looser examples...
Pro-life advocates say that beings without preferences have rights by virtue of future preferences. Not all of them are religious.
Hindus treat books (all books in general) with reverence because they are vehicles of learning, despite not necessarily believing in deities.
Many social conservatives report being unwilling to slap their fathers, even with permission, as part of a play.
The classic trolley problem implies that many people's moral intuitions hinge on the act of murder being wrong, rather than the effect that the death has on the values, feelings, and preferences being morally wrong.
Of course, if you are a moral realist, you can just say that these people's intuitions are "wrong"...but the point is that "feelings, values, and preferences" - in a word, utilitarianism - isn't the only guiding moral principle that humans care about.
And yes, you could argue that this is all a deity's preferences...but why did they decide that those were in fact the deity's preferences? Doesn't it hint that they might have an underlying feeling of those preferences in themselves, that they would project those wishes on a deity?
No doubt some of them will, but I suspect you meant "conservationists." And yes, I agree that some of those will assign intrinsic value to "nature" in various forms, or at least claim to, as you describe.
Some of them do, yes. Indeed, I suspect the ones who say that are disproportionately non-religious.
A fine question.
That's one possibility, yes.
And, again, if destroying entity X is wrong because some other entity Y says so, that is not inherent.
Indeed. Do you mean to say that you don't expect it to be said, or merely that those saying it are confused?
The latter.