If you care about suffering, you don't stop caring just because you learn that there are no objectively right numerical tradeoff-values attached to the neural correlates of consciousness.
I wasn't suggesting giving up on ethics, I was suggesting giving up on utilitarianism.
This is only problematic if you want to do something else, e.g. find a universally valid solution that all other minds would also agree with. I suspect that this isn't possible.
I think there are other approaches that do better than utilitarianism at its weak areas.
I don't see how hybrid theorists would solve the problem of things being "guesswork" either. In fact, there are multiple layers of guesswork involved there: you first need to determine in which cases which theories apply and to what extent, and then you need to solve all the issues within a theory.
Metaethically, hybrid theorists do need to figure out which theories apply where, and that isnt guesswork.
At the object level, it is quite possible, at the first approximation, to cash out your obligations as whatever society obliges you to do -- deontologists have a simpler problem to solve.
I still don't see any convincing objections to all the arguments I gave when I explained why I consider it likely that deontology is the result of moral rationalizing. The objection you gave about aggregation doesn't hold, because it applies to most or all moral views.
My principle argument is that it ain't necessarily so. You put forward, without any specific evidence, a version of events where deontology arises out of attempts to rationalise random intuitions. I put forward, without any specific evidence a version of events where widespread deontology arises out of rules being defined socially, and people internalising them. My handwaving theory doesn't defeat yours, since they both have the same, minimal, support, but it does show that your theory doesn'thave any unique status as the default or only theory of de facto deontology.
I wasn't suggesting giving up on ethics, I was suggesting giving up on utilitarianism.
What I wrote concerned giving up on caring about suffering, which is very closely related with utilitarianism.
I think there are other approaches that do better than utilitarianism at its weak areas.
Maybe according to your core intuitions, but not for me as far as I know.
but it does show that your theory doesn'thave any unique status as the default or only theory of de facto deontology.
But my main point was that deontology is too vague for a theory that specif...
This post is a half-baked idea that I'm posting here in order to get feedback and further brainstorming. There seem to be some interesting parallels between epistemology and ethics.
Part 1: Moral Anti-Epistemology
"Anti-Epistemology" refers to bad rules of reasoning that exist not because they are useful/truth-tracking, but because they are good at preserving people's cherished beliefs about the world. But cherished beliefs don't just concern factual questions, they also very much concern moral issues. Therefore, we should expect there to be a lot of moral anti-epistemology.
Tradition as a moral argument, tu quoque, opposition to the use of thought experiments, the noncentral fallacy, slogans like "morality is from humans for humans" – all these are instances of the same general phenomenon. This is trivial and doesn't add much to the already well-known fact that humans often rationalize, but it does add the memetic perspective: Moral rationalizations sometimes concern more than a singular instance, they can affect the entire way people reason about morality. And like with religion or pseudoscience in epistemology about factual claims, there could be entire memeplexes centered around moral anti-epistemology.
A complication is that metaethics is complicated; it is unclear what exactly moral reasoning is, and whether everyone is trying to do the same thing when they engage in what they think of as moral reasoning. Labelling something "moral anti-epistemology" would suggest that there is a correct way to think about morality. Is there? As long as we always make sure to clarify what it is that we're trying to accomplish, it would seem possible to differentiate between valid and invalid arguments in regard to the specified goal. And this is where moral anti-epistemology might cause troubles.
Are there reasons to assume that certain popular ethical beliefs are a result of moral anti-epistemology? Deontology comes to mind (mostly because it's my usual suspect when it comes to odd reasoning in ethics), but what is it about deontology that relies on "faulty moral reasoning", if indeed there is something about it that does? How much of it relies on the noncentral fallacy, for instance? Is Yvain's personal opinion that "much of deontology is just an attempt to formalize and justify this fallacy" correct? The perspective of moral anti-epistemology would suggest that it is the other way around: Deontology might be the by-product of people applying the noncentral fallacy, which is done because it helps protect cherished beliefs. Which beliefs would that be? Perhaps the strongly felt intuition that "Some things are JUST WRONG?", which doesn't handle fuzzy concepts/boundaries well and therefore has to be combined with a dogmatic approach. It sounds somewhat plausible, but also really speculative.
Part 2: Memetics
A lot of people are skeptical towards these memetical just-so stories. They argue that the points made are either too trivial, or too speculative. I have the intuition that a memetic perspective often helps clarify things, and my thoughts about applying the concept of anti-epistemology to ethics seemed like an insight, but I have a hard time coming up with how my expectations about the world have changed because of it. What, if anything, is the value of the idea I just presented? Can I now form a prediction to test whether deontologists want to primarily formalize and justify the noncentral fallacy, or whether they instead want to justify something else by making use of the noncentral fallacy?
Anti-epistemology is a more general model of what is going on in the world than rationalizations are, so it should all reduce to rationalizations in the end. So it shouldn't be worrying that I don't magically find more stuff. Perhaps my expectations were too high and I should be content with having found a way to categorize moral rationalizations, the knowledge of which will make me slightly quicker at spotting or predicting them.
Thoughts?