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Lumifer comments on Be comfortable with hypocrisy - Less Wrong
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Comments (78)
I don't find this self-evident. In which meaning do you use the word "wrong"?
If some of the elements of a moral code contradict some of the other elements, at least one of them must be wrong.
First, inconsistency is not the same thing as contradiction. If my morals involve consulting a random-number generator at some point, the results will be inconsistent in the sense that I will behave differently in the same situation. That does not imply that some elements of my morals contradict other elements.
Second, I still don't know what does "wrong" mean here.
I think you are confusing logical and behavioral consistency here. The OP meant inconsistent in the logical sense, while you are thinking of behavioral consistency. Another context for consistency is matter, where consistency refers to the viscosity of the material. In each case it refers to how resilient (or resistant to damage) something is.
I wouldn't call that an inconsistency. Your morals would be "In [situation], do what RNG tells me" and not "In [situation}, do X". Both decision rules are consistent. I'm not sure we mean the same thing by "inconsistent moral code" - I'd say that an inconsistent moral code would have contradictions in it.
Consider if I said "All Xarbles are Yarbles, all Yables are Zarbles, but not all Xarbles are Zarbles". You may have no idea what I'm talking about but you'd still be able to say that I'm wrong because I'm contradicting myself. Something similar is the case here.
What would be for you an example of inconsistent behavior, then?
If you climb the abstraction tree high enough, you can always get to consistency, if only in the form of "Do what your morals tell you to do".
I don't think so. Morals are not syllogisms. In particular, "X is wrong" is a different claim from "X is inconsistent" or "X is not logically coherent".
If you say that eating meat is wrong, but then eat it.
That's true, but "do what your morals tell you to do" is vacuous and not action-guiding. Morality must be action-guiding, and "In [situation], do X" and "In [situation], do what RNG tells you" are both action-guiding.
If I say "Eating meat is wrong, one should never do something wrong, it is sometimes permissible to eat meat", there is a contradiction, and that requires at least one of the three statements to be false.
If you say that eating meat is wrong, and you eat meat, then you are factually wrong about eating meat being morally wrong, you are acting morally wrongly when you eat meat, or both.
It's not clear whether you are incorrect, immoral, or both. However, what you clearly are not doing is acting in a moral manner because it is moral. You can't be doing that if you don't know what's moral, and you can't be doing that if you're acting immorally. You might get lucky and act morally by coincidence, but since that's not something that can be done consistently, there's little point in rewarding it.