I always just want to know: how do you propose to naturalize utilitarianism, thus showing your normative questions to actually be factual ones, thus showing that your normative claims are in fact grounded?
I would like to write an essay about that eventually, but I figured persuading PUs of the merits of HU was lower hanging fruit.
For what it's worth, I have a lot of sympathy with your scepticism - I would rather (and believe it possible to) build a system resembling ethics up without reference to normativity, 'oughts', or any of their associated baggage. I think the trick will be to properly understand the overlap of ethics and epistemology, both of which are subject to similar questions (how do we non question-beggingly 'ground' 'factual' questions?), but the former of whose questions people disproportionately emphasise.
[ETA] It's also hard to pin down what the null hypothesis would be. Calling it 'nihilism' of any kind is just defining the problem away. For eg, if you just decide you want to do something nice for your friend - in the sense of something beneficial for her, rather than just picking an act that will give you warm fuzzies - then your presumption of what category of things would be 'nice for her' implicitly judges how to group states of the world. If you also feel like some things you might do would be nicer for her than others, then you're judging how to order states of the world.
This already has the makings of a 'moral system', even though there's not a 'thou shalt' in sight. If you further think that how she'll react to whatever you do for her can corroborate/refute your judgement of what things are nice(r than others) for her, your system seems to have, if not a 'realist' element, at least a non purely antirealist/subjectivist one. It's not utilitarianism (yet), but it seems to be heading in that sort of direction.
For eg, if you just decide you want to do something nice for your friend - in the sense of something beneficial for her, rather than just picking an act that will give you warm fuzzies - then your presumption of what category of things would be 'nice for her' implicitly judges how to group states of the world. If you also feel like some things you might do would be nicer for her than others, then you're judging how to order states of the world.
This already has the makings of a 'moral system', even though there's not a 'thou shalt' in sight. If you further think that how she'll react to whatever you do for her can corroborate/refute your judgement of what things are nice(r than others) for her, your system seems to have, if not a 'realist' element, at least a non purely antirealist/subjectivist one.
Very true! And this is precisely why I'm outright suspicious of non-naturalistic theoretical ethics and it's magical "oughts". In my case, in fact, I'm especially suspicious of Peter Singer and his simplistic form of hedonic utilitarianism, because it seems to me to rely overmuch on intuition pumps and too little on naturalized descriptions of how actual agents judge value.
Good thing Bayesians don't need to identify the null hypothesis.
Upvoted for mentioning that ethics and epistemology are subject to similar questions. That's a huge insight, familiar in academic philosophy, but AFAICT rare among self-identified rationalists and little discussed on lesswrong.
Upvoted for mentioning that ethics and epistemology are subject to similar questions. That's a huge insight, familiar in academic philosophy, but AFAICT rare among self-identified rationalists and little discussed on lesswrong.
Of course, the academic philosophy way to handle the insight has usually been worse than useless: take the Mysterious Phenomenon of "epistemic normativity" as reason to believe in metaphysically basic moral normativity, then use that to ground epistemology, and thus go from one field that can be naturalized and one that is claimed to remain a mystery, to -1 fields naturalized and two fields made Mysteriously Metaphysical.
Whatever you call it, they've got to identify some alternative, even if only tacitly by following some approximation of it in their daily life.
http://valence-utilitarianism.com/?p=8
I like this essay particularly for the way it breaks down different forms of utilitarianism to various axes, which have rarely been discussed on LW much.
For utilitarianism in general:
For preference utilitarianism in particular:
See the article for more detailed discussion about each of the axes of preference utilitarianism, and more.