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TimS comments on Morality should be Moral - Less Wrong
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Comments (63)
If there is a True Morality, I think that "True Morality --> sensus moralitus --> morally correct choices" is how it would work.
Our complete inability to identify anything like a universal "sensus moralitus" is evidence that there's no such thing as True Morality. Mirror neurons or similar candidates seem unable to explain the wide divergence in actual moral practices across time and culture.
I could make a similar argument from the different beliefs about the physical world to argue that there is no such thing as Truth.
I could make a similar argument from the different tastes in food to argue that there is no such thing as Yummy.
If I'm interpreting your comment correctly, I think you are confusing my argument with its converse.
Why? Our knowledge of descriptive truths about the external world operates on this sort of perceptual model, but not our knowledge of all truth. For instance, our knowledge of mathematical truths does not appear to rely on a sensus mathematicus. Why think the perceptual model would be the appropriate one for moral truth?
It's a fair question. In brief, my sense is that moral disputes look like empirical disputes from an outside view. Moral disputants look like empirical disputants, not mathematical disputants.
Falsely believing we have a "sensus moralitus" when we actually don't seems like a complete explanation of the politics-is-the-mindkiller phenomena.
Empirical disputes tend to move from generalizations to particulars, since perception is regarded as the ultimate arbiter, and our perception is of particulars. So if two people disagree about whether oppositely charged objects attract or repel one another (a generalization), one of them might say, "Well, let's see if this positively charged metal block attracts or repels this negatively charged block." We rely on the fact that agents with similar perceptual systems will often agree about particular perceptions, and this is leveraged to resolve disagreement about general claims.
Moral disputes, on the other hand, tend to move in the opposite direction, from particulars to generalizations. Disputants start out disagreeing about the right thing to do in a particular circumstance, and they attempt to resolve the disagreement by appeal to general principles. In this case, we think that agents with similar biological and cultural backgrounds will tend to agree about general moral principles ("avoidable suffering is bad", "discrimination based on irrelevant characteristics is bad", etc.) and leverage this agreement to attempt to resolve particular disagreements. So the direction of justification is the opposite of what one would expect from the perceptual model.
This suggests to me that if there are moral truths, then our knowledge of them is probably not best explained using the perceptual model. I do agree that moral disagreements aren't entirely like mathematical disagreements either, but I only brought up the mathematical case as an example of there being other "kinds of truth". I didn't intend to claim that morality and mathematics will share an epistemology. I would say that knowing moral truths is a lot more like knowing truths about, say, the rules for rational thinking.
Nah. It's bi-directional, in roughly equal proportions.