buybuydandavis comments on Lesswrong 2016 Survey - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Elo 30 March 2016 06:17PM

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Comment author: DanArmak 26 March 2016 06:34:54PM 8 points [-]

As before, I found the question on metaethics (31) to be a tossup because I agree with several of the options given. I'd be interested in hearing from people who agree with some but not all of these answers:

  • Non-cognitivism: Moral statements don't express propositions and can neither be true nor false. "Murder is wrong" means something like "Boo murder!".
  • Error theory: Moral statements have a truth-value, but attempt to describe features of the world that don't exist. "Murder is wrong" and "Murder is right" are both false statements because moral rightness and wrongness aren't features that exist.
  • Subjectivism: Some moral statements are true, but not universally, and the truth of a moral statement is determined by non-universal opinions or prescriptions, and there is no non-attitudinal determinant of rightness and wrongness. "Murder is wrong" means something like "My culture has judged murder to be wrong" or "I've judged murder to be wrong".

I'm a subjectivist: I understand that when someone says "murder is wrong", she's expressing a personal judgement - others can judge differently. But I also know that most people are moral realists, so they wrongly think they are describing features of the world that don't in fact exist; thus, I believe in error theory. And what does it mean to proclaim that something "is wrong", other than to boo it, i.e. to call for people not to do it and to shun those who do? Thus, I also agree with non-cognitivism.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 29 March 2016 12:09:22PM 1 point [-]

I treat a moral sense similar to how I'd treat a "yummy" sense. Your nervous system does an evaluation. Sometimes it evaluates as yummy, sometimes as moral.

But the moral sense operates with a different domain and range than yummy, in that it has preferences between behaviors, and preferences between preferences about behaviors,... and implies reward and punishment up the level of abstraction in that scale of preferences.

I opted for Subjectivism as the best match.

Error Theory just seems rather dumb. I think I get the sense in which you mean it, which seems like a valid observation about the error of objectivists, but I think you're mistaking the definition here. It said " moral rightness and wrongness aren't features that exist", but they do, regardless of confusion that moral objectivists may have about them. They exist to you, right?

Non-cognitivism seems like a straw man moral subjectivism. There is a lot more to it than just "boo". There is structure to the behavioral preferences and the resulting behavioral responses.

Comment author: gjm 29 March 2016 12:31:56PM *  1 point [-]

I treat a moral sense similar to how I'd treat a "yummy" sense.

You are not the first to draw this parallel.

[EDITED to add:] Really fun paper, by the way.