Comment on Beware the Nihilistic Failure Mode

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 03:06:49 GMT

I think that using this notation is misleading. If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that given an individual, we can derive their morality from their (real/physically grounded) state, which gives real/physically grounded morality (for that individual). Furthermore, you are using "objective" where I used "real/physically ground". Unfortunately, one of the common meanings of objective is "ontologically fundamental and not contingent", so your statement sounds like it is saying something that it isn't.

I used 'objective and contingent' instead of 'subjective' because ethical subjectivists are usually moral relativists. I noted that I was referring to an objective morality that is contingent rather than ontologically fundamental.

On a separate note, I'm not sure why you are casually dismissing moral nihilism as wrong. As far as I am aware, moral nihilism is the position that morality is not ontologically fundamental. Personally, I am a moral nihilist; my experience shows that morality as typically discussed refers to a collection of human intuitions and social constructs - it seems bizarre to believe that to be an ontologically fundamental phenomenon. I think a sizable fraction of LW is of like mind, though I can only speak for myself.

But there's that language again that people use when they talk about moral nihilism, where I can't tell if they're just using different words, or if they really think that morality can be whatever we want it to be, or that it doesn't mean anything to say that moral propositions are true or false.

I would even go further and say that I don't believe in objective contingent morality. Certainly, most people have an individual idea of what they find moral. However, this only establishes that there is an objective contingent response to the question "what do you find moral?" There is similarly an objective contingent response to the related question "what is morality?", or the question "what is the difference between right and wrong?" Sadly, I expect the responses in each case to differ (due to framing effects, at the very least). To me, this shows that unless you define "morality" quite tightly (which could require some arbitrary decisions on your part), your construction is not well defined.

I wouldn't ask people those questions. People can be wrong about what they value. The point of moral philosophy is to know what you should do. It's probably best to do away with the old metaethical terms and just say: To say that you should do something is to say that if you do that thing, then it will fulfill your values; you and other humans have slightly different values based on individual, cultural and perhaps even biological differences, but have relatively similar values to one another compared to a random utility function because of shared evolutionary history.

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