= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Tsujigiri comments on Disguised Queries - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (104)
Indeed.
For example:
I think that Jesus' response is a non sequitur (a well designed one (by using a technique similar to equivocation), which is why it makes for such good "blocking" technique). So there's no disguised query, since Jesus isn't querying at all, he's just trying to "win" the argument.
There is a similarity between Christians and many atheists in their moral philosophy, however. Atheists may not believe in God, but I think they mostly adhere to the 10 commandments.
At least Christians can say they follow their moral philosophy because God told them so. What reason do atheists have?
I was actually just trying to say that Eliezer gave a bad example of a disguised query.
As for moral philosophy, it can be considered a science. So atheists that believe in morality should value it as any other science (for it's usefulness etc). Well, hm, atheists need not be fans of science. So they can be moral because they enjoy it, or simply because "why the heck not".
I wouldn't call moral philosophy a science.
If we both independently invented an imaginary creature, neither would be correct. They are simply the creatures we've arbitrarily created. There is no science of moral philosophy anymore than there is a science of inventing an imaginary creature.
I'd say to be science there needs to be the ability to test whether something is valid. There is no such test for the validity of morals anymore than there is a test for the validity of an imaginary creature.
You have that backwards.
Moral people follow their moral philosophy because they believe it's the right thing to do, whether they are Christian or atheist or neither.
Some moral people also believe God has told them to do certain things, and use those beliefs to help them select a moral philosophy. Those people are moral and religious.
Other moral people don't believe that, and select a moral philosophy without the aid of that belief. Those people are moral and atheist.
Some immoral people believe that God has told them to do certain things. Those people are immoral and religious.
Some immoral people don't believe that. Those people are immoral and atheist.
Incidentally, I know no atheists (whether moral or not) who adhere to the Talmudic version of the first commandment. But then, since you are talking about the ten commandments in a Christian rather than Jewish context, I suppose you don't subscribe to the Talmudic version anyway a. (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments#Two_texts_with_numbering_schemes)
EDIT: I should probably also say explicitly that I don't mean to assert here that nobody follows the ten commandments simply because they believe God told them to... perhaps some people do. But someone who doesn't think the ten commandments are the right thing to do and does them anyway simply because God told them to is not a moral person, but rather a devout or God-fearing person. (e.g., Abraham setting out to sacrifice his son).
I also know no atheists who adhere to the second commandment (make no graven image), the fourth (no "work" on Shabbath), or the tenth (do not covet).
I think you're just trying to say that atheists follow moral expectations of modern Christian-influenced culture, but taken literally, the statement's nonsense.
I mean, look at the Ten Commandments:
The first 4 are blatantly ignored, 6 is famously problematic, 9 and 10 are mostly ignored (via gossip, status seeking, greed and so on) and finally 7 and 8 might be typically obeyed, but minor theft (especial anonymous) is common and adultery has at least 10% base rates.
How is this a "mostly adhered"? (Obviously, Christians and atheists don't really differ in their behavior here.)
In the interests of charitable reading, I took them to mean "atheists adhere to the ten commandments about as well as Christians do".
I looked through them and I was surprised at how little I break them. 4 is way off, of course and I'll honour my father and mother to the extend they damn well earn it (rather a lot as it turns out). The thing is going by the standards that I actually held for following all those commandments when I was Christian I could have expected to be violating all over the place. I'm particularly disappointed with No. 7. I've been making a damn fine effort to be living in sin as much as conveniently possible but since I have yet to sleep with a married woman I seem to be clean on that one. Going by the actual commandment I'm probably even ok with 3. The "swearing" thing seems to be totally blown out of proportion.
Personally I break some of them more often than I'd like, but then again I did so when I identified as an Orthodox Jew as well.
Of course, if I were to take this seriously, I'd get bogged down in definitional issues pretty quickly. For example, I've slept with a married man (married to someone else, I mean), so I guess I've violated #7... or at least, he did. OTOH, given that everyone involved was aware of the situation and OK with it, I don't consider that any of us were doing anything wrong in the process.
But a certain kind of religious person would say that my beliefs about what's right and wrong don't matter. Of course, I would disagree.
I suppose you do technically scrape through in adhering to No. 7 as it is presented in that wikipedia passage based on two technicalities. That it it is only adultery if you sleep with a married woman and that being the partner of the adulterer doesn't qualify. (I'm a little skeptical of that passage actually). Come to think of it you may get a reprieve for a third exception if it is the case that the other guy was married to a guy (ambiguous).
The guy in question was married to a woman at the time.
Agreed about the technicalities.
It's 6, isn't it! (Dexter has that problem too - I recommend following his example and at least chanelling it into vigilantism.)
Well, I kill all the time... most people I know do.
But if we adopt the conventional practice of translating "lo tirtzoch" as "don't murder", and further adopt the conventional practice of not labeling killings we're morally OK with as "murder", then I squeak by here as well... I'm basically OK with all the killing I've done.
I've never actually watched Dexter, but I gather it's about someone compelled to murder people who chooses to murder only people where the world is improved by their death? Hrm. I'm not sure I agree.
Certainly, if I'm going to murder someone, it should be the least valuable person I can find. Which might turn out to be myself. The question for me is how reliable my judgment is on the matter. If I'm not a reliable judge, I should recuse myself from judgement.
Perhaps I should assemble a committee to decide on my victims.
That doesn't sound like a convention that the quite fits with culture or spirit of the holy law in question or of the culture which would create such a law.
Huh? The Israelites were for killing people during wartime, and the various cultures that interpreted that law all bent it to exclude the deaths they wanted to cause.
In what I've seen of Dexter the most ethically grey kill was of a pedophile who was stalking his step-daughter (and that's a murder I'd be comfortable committing!). The rest were all murderers who were highly likely to kill again.
For my part I would prefer to live in a world in which other people don't go around being vigilantes and also don't want to be a vigilante myself. Because frankly it isn't my problem and it isn't worth the risk or the effort it would take me.
Slightly more specific and slightly less consequentialistic than that. He chooses to kill only other murderers, and usually only cold-blooded murderers who are unrepentant and likely to murder again, (example: one time he stopped when he realized his selected victim had only murdered the person that had raped him in prison).
But it's not about improving the world really, sometimes he even sabotages the police investigation just so he can have these people to himself.
I think the general idea is that by "murder" the concept of 'do not kill people without it being prescribed by the law' is meant -- with the rest of Mosaic law indicating in which cases it was okay to kill people nonetheless.
So killing insects doesn't count (because they're not people), nor being a state executioner counts (because it's prescribed by the law).
Yeah, you're right. I was being snarky in the general direction of my Yeshiva upbringing, at the expense of accuracy.
I'll have to concede that atheists moral beliefs don't mostly adhere to the 10 commandments.
The point I wished to make was that many of the moral philosophies of rationalists are very similar to their Christian counterparts. I believe the similarity is mostly due to the culture they were brought up in rather than whether they believe God exists or not. You might even consider God to be irrelevant to the issue.
Agreed. Obligatory Moldbug link (warning: long, and only first in a series) for an interesting derivation of (some) modern morality as atheistic Christianity.
I certainly agree that many people's moral beliefs are shaped and constrained by their culture, and that God is irrelevant to this, as is belief in God.
Upvoted for the 10th commandment link.
Maybe because they have decided that a specific moral philosophy would be most useful?
Nitpick: Only half of the Ten Commandments are nice humanitarian commandments like "don't murder". The other half are all about how humans should interact with God, and I don't think most atheists put much weight behind "you will not make for yourself any statue or any picture of the sky above or the earth below or the water that is beneath the earth".
They can say that, but unless they already have a moral philosophy that gives God moral authority (or states that Hell is to be avoided, or justifies gratitude for Creation, or...) that's not actually a reason.
Well, for myself, it's because game theory says the world works better when people aren't dicks to one another, and because empathy (intuitive and rational) allow me to put myself in other peoples' shoes, and to appreciate that it's good to try to help them when I can, since they're very much like myself. I have desires and goals, and so do they, and mine aren't particularly more important simply because they're mine.
This is the base of my whole moral philosophy, too. And you know what? There are people who actually disagree with it! Responses I've gotten from people in discussions have ranged from "I don't give a shit about other people, they're not me" to "you can't think like that, you need to think selfishly, because otherwise everyone will trample on you."
Lots of reasons. It's pretty much built into the human brain that being nice to your friends and neighbours is helpful to long-term survival, so most people get pleasant feelings from doing something they consider 'good', and feel guilty after doing something they consider 'bad'. You don't need the Commandments themselves.
...Oh and the whole idea that it's better to live in a society where everyone follows laws like "don't murder"...even if you personally could benefit from murdering the people who you didn't like, you don't want everyone else murdering people too, and so it makes sense, as a society, to teach children that 'murder is bad'.
Are these reasons to not kill people or steal? Can I propose a test? Suppose that it were built into the human brain that being cruel to your friends and neighbors is helpful to long-term survival (bear with me on the evolutionary implausibility of this), and so must people get pleasant feelings from doing things they consider cruel, and feel guilty after doing nice things.
Suppose all that were true: would you then have good reasons to to be cruel? If not, then how are they reasons to be nice?
You would clearly have reasons; whether they are good reasons depends how you're measuring "good".
We might want to distinguish here between reasons to do something and reasons why one does something. So imagine we discover that the color green makes people want to compromise, so we paint a boardroom green. During a meeting, the chairperson decides to compromise. Even if the chairperson knows about the study, and is being affected by the green walls in a decisive way (such that the greenness of the walls is the reason why he or she compromises), could the chairperson take the greenness of the walls as a reason to compromise?
A reasonable distinction, but I don't think it quite maps onto the issue at hand. You said to suppose "people get pleasant feelings from doing things they consider cruel, and feel guilty after doing nice things". If one has a goal to feel pleasant feelings, and is structured in that manner, then that is reason to be cruel, not just reason why they would be cruel.
Agreed, but so much is packed into that 'if'. We all seek pleasure, but not one of us believes it is an unqualified good. The implication of Swimmer's post was that atheists have reasons to obey the ten commandments (well, 4 or 5 of them) comparable in formal terms to the reasons Christians have (God'll burn me if I don't, or whatever). That is, the claim seems to be that atheists can justify their actions. Now, if someone does something nice for me, and I ask her why she did that, she can reply with some facts about evolutionary biology. This might explain her behavior, but it doesn't justify it.
If we imagine someone committing a murder and then telling us something about her (perhaps defective) neurobiology, we might take this to explain their behavior, but never to justify it. We would never say 'Yeah, I guess now that you make those observations about your brain, it was reasonable of you to kill that guy." The point is that the murderer hasn't just given us a bad reason, she hasn't given us a reason at all. We cannot call her rational if this is all she has.
I didn't claim that, and if I implied it, it was by accident. (Although I do think that a lot of atheists have just as strong if not stronger reasons to obey certain moral rules, the examples I gave weren't those examples.) I was trying to point out that if someone decides one day to stop believing in God, and realizes that this means God won't smite them if they break one of the Ten Commandments, that doesn't mean they'll go out and murder someone. Their moral instincts, and the positive/negative reinforcement to obey them (i.e. pleasure or guilt), keep existing regardless of external laws.
So we ask her why, and she says "oh, he took the seat that I wanted on the bus three weeks in a row, and his humming is annoying, and he always copies my exams." Which might not be a good reason to murder someone according to you, with your normal neurobiology–you would content yourself with fuming and making rude comments about him to your friends–but she considers it a good reason, because her mental 'brakes' are off.
Right, we agree on that. But if the apostate thereafter has no reason to regard themselves as morally responsible, then their moral behavior is no longer fully rational. They're sort of going through the motions.
The question here isn't about good vs. bad reasons, but between admissible vs. inadmissible reasons. Hearsay is often a bad reason to believe that Peter shot Paul, but it is a reason. It counts as evidence. If that's all you have, then you're not reasoning well, but you are reasoning. The number of planets orbiting the star furthest from the sun is not a reason to believe Peter shot Paul. It's not that it's a bad reason. It's just totally inadmissible. If that's all you have, then you're not reasoning badly, you're just not reasoning at all.
It's a hard world to visualize, but if cruelty-tendencies evolved because people survived better by being cruel, then cruelty works in that world, and society would be dysfunctional if there were rules against it (imagine our world having rules against being nice, ever!), and to me, something being useful is a good reason to do it.
If we ever came across that species, no doubt we'd be appalled, but the universe isn't appalled. Not unless you believe that morality exists in itself, independently of brains...which I don't.
If there were an entire society built out of people like this, then probably quite a lot of minor day-to-day cruelty would go on, and there would be rationalized Laws, like the Ten Commandments, justifying why being cruel was so important, and there would be social customs and structures and etiquette involved in making sure the right kind of cruelty happened at the right times...
I'm not saying that our brain's evolutionary capacity for empathy is the ultimate perfect moral theory. But I do think that all those moral theories, perfect or ultimate or not, exist because our brains evolved to have the little voice of empathy. Which means that if you take away the Ten Commandments, most people won't stop being nice to people they care about.
(Being nice to strangers or members of an outgroup is a completely different matter...there seems to be a mechanism for turning off empathy towards groups of strangers, and plenty of societies have produced people who were very nice to their friends and neighbors, and barbaric towards everyone else.)
Most atheists don't accept deontological moral theories–i.e. any theory that talks about a set of a priori rules of what's right versus wrong. But morality doesn't go away. If you reason it out starting from what our brains already tell us, you end up with utilitarian theories ("I like being happy, and I'm capable of empathy, so I think other people must like being happy too, and since my perfect world would be one where I was happy all the time, the perfect world for everyone would be one with maximum happiness.")
Alternately you end up with Kantian theories ("I like being treated as an end, not a means, and empathy tells me other people are similar to me, so we should treat everyone as an end in themselves or not a means... Oh, and Action X will make me happy, but if everyone else did Action X too, it would make me unhappy, and empathy tells me everyone else is about like me, so they wouldn't want me to do X, so the best society is one in which no one does X.") Etc.
If you don't reason it out, you get "well, it made me happy when I helped Susan with her homework, and it made me feel bad when I said something mean to Rachel and she cried, so I should help people more and not be mean as much." These feelings aren't perfect, and there are lots of conflicting feelings, so people aren't nice all the time...but the innate brain mechanisms are there even when there aren't any laws, and the fact that they're there is probably the reason why there are laws at all.
So we agree that one might have a reason to do something because it's recommended by moral theories. What I'm questioning is whether or not you can have a reason to do something on the basis of brain mechanisms or if you can have reason to adopt a moral theory on the basis of brain mechanisms. And I don't mean 'good' reasons, I mean admissible reasons.
Imagine someone thinking to themselves: 'Well, my brain is structured in such and such a way as a result of evolution, so I think I'll kill this completely innocent guy over here.' Is he thinking rationally?
And concerning the adoption of a moral theory:
There's a missing inference here from wanting to be happy to wanting other people to be happy. Can you explain how you think this argument gets filled out? As it stands, it's not valid.
Likewise:
Why should the fact that other people want something motivate me? It doesn't follow from the fact that my wanting something motivates me, that another person's wanting that thing should motivate me. In both these arguments there's a missing step which, I think, is pertinent to the problem above: the fact that I am motivated to X doesn't even give me reason to X, much less a reason to pursue the desires of other people.
Beliefs don't feel like beliefs, they feel like the way the world is. Likewise with brain structures. If someone is a sociopath (in short, their brain mechanism for empathy is broken) and they decide they want to kill someone for reasons X and Y, are they being any more irrational than someone who volunteers at a soup kitchen because seeing people smile when he hands them their food makes him feel fulfilled?
Sorry for not being clear. The inference is that "empathy", the ability to step into someone else's shoes and imagine being them, is an innate ability that most humans have, leads you to think that other people are like you...when they feel pleasure, it's like your pleasure, and when they feel pain, it's like your pain, and there's a hypothetical world where you could have been them. I don't think this hypothetical is something that's taught by moral theories, because I remember reasoning with it as a child when I'd had basically no exposure to formal moral theories, only the standard "that wasn't nice, you should apologize." If you could have been them, you want the same things for them that you'd want for yourself.
I think this is immediately obvious for family members and friends...do you want your mother to be happy? Your children?
Perhaps on some level this is right, but the fact that I can assess the truth of my beliefs means that they don't feel like the way the world is in an important respect. They feel like things that are true and false. The way the world is has no truth value. Very small children have problem with this distinction, but so far as I can tell almost all healthy adults do not believe that their beliefs are identical with the world. ETA: That sounded jerky. I didn't intend any covert meanness, and please forgive any appearance of that.
I think I really don't understand your question. Could you explain the idea behind this a little better? My objection was that there are reasons to do things, and reasons why we do things, and while all reasons to do things are also reasons why, there are reasons why that are not reasons to do things. For example, having a micro-stroke might be the reason why I drive my car over an embankment, but it's not a reason to drive one's car over an embankment. No rational person could say to themselves "Huh, I just had a micro-stroke. I guess that means I should drive over this embankment."
Sure, but I take myself to have moral reasons for this. I may feel this way because of my biology, but my biology is never itself a reason for me to do anything.
OK, let me give you a better example. When you look at something, a lot of very complex hardware packed into your retina, optic nerve, and visual cortex, a lot of hard-won complexity optimized over millions of years, is going all out analyzing the data and presenting you with comprehensible shapes, colour, and movement, as well as helpful recognizing objects for you. When you look at something, are you aware of all that happening? Or do you just see it?
(Disclaimer: if you've read a lot about neuroscience, it's quite possible that sometimes you do think about your visual processing centres while you're looking at something. But the average person wouldn't, and the average person probably doesn't think 'well, there go my empathy centres again' when they see an old lady having trouble with her grocery bag and feel a desire to help her.)
Okay, let's try to unpack this. In my example, we have a sociopath who wants to murder someone. The reason why he wants to murder someone, when most people don't, is because there's a centre in his brain that's broken and so hasn't learned to see the world from another's perspective, thus hasn't internalized any social morality because it doesn't make sense to him...basically, people are objects to him, so why not kill them. His reason to murder someone is because, let's say, they're dating a girl he wants to date. Most non-sociopaths wouldn't consider that a reason to murder anyone, but the reason why they wouldn't is because they have an innate understanding that other people feel pain, of the concept of fairness, etc, and were thus capable of learning more complex moral rules as well.
The way I see it, the biology aspect is both necessary and sufficient for this kind of behaviour. Someone without the requisite biology wouldn't be a good parent or friend because they'd see no reason to make an effort (unless they were deliberately "faking it" to benefit from that person). And an ordinary human being raised with no exposure to moral rules, who isn't taught anything about it explicitly, will still want to make their friends happy and do the best they can raising children. They may not be very good at it, but unless they're downright abused/severely neglected, they won't be evil.
I just see it. I'm aware on some abstract level, but I never think about this when I see things, and I don't take it into account when I confidently believe what I see.
"His reason to murder someone is because, let's say, they're dating a girl he wants to date. Most non-sociopaths wouldn't consider that a reason to murder anyone"
I guess I'd disagree with the second claim, or at least I'd want to qualify it. Having a broken brain center is an inadmissible reason to kill someone. If that's the only explanation someone could give (or that we could supply them) then we wouldn't even hold them responsible for their actions. But dating your beloved really is a reason to kill someone. It's a very bad reason, all things considered, but it is a reason. In this case, the killer would be held responsible.
"The way I see it, the biology aspect is both necessary and sufficient for this kind of behaviour. "
Necessary, we agree. Sufficient is, I think, too much, especially if we're relying on evolutionary explanations, which should never stand in without qualification for psychological, much less rational explanations. After all, I could come to hate my family if our relationship soured. This happens to many, many people who are not significantly different from me in this biological respect.
An ordinary human being raised with no exposure to moral rules in an extremely strange counterfactual: no person I have ever met, or ever heard of, is like this. I would probably say that there's not really any sense in which they were 'raised' at all. Could they have friends? Is that so morally neutral an idea that one could learn it while leaning nothing of loyalty? I really don't think I can imagine a rational, language-using human adult who hasn't been exposed to moral rules.
So the 'necessity' case is granted. We agree there. The 'sufficiency' case is very problematic. I don't think you could even have learned a first language without being exposed to moral rules, and if you never learn any language, then you're just not really a rational agent.
Relevant LW post.
That post is in need of some serious editing: I genuinely couldn't tell if it was on the whole agreeing with what I was saying or not.
I have a puzzle for you: suppose we lived in a universe which is entirely deterministic. From the present state of the universe, all future states could be computed. Would that mean that deliberation in which we try to come to a decision about what to do is meaningless, impossible, or somehow undermined? Or would this make no difference?
Christians allegedly follow the commandments because God told them to. They do what God told them to because of desire to avoid punishment, desire to obtain reward, desire to fulfill their perceived duty, or desire to express their love. They fulfill these desires because it makes them feel good/happy.
Atheists do whatever they do, most of them for the same reason, cut out the idea of it being centered around a personality who effects their happiness.
Harry said he preferred achieving things over happiness, but I can't help thinking that if he had sacrificed his potential, he wouldn't really have been happy about it, no matter how many friends he had.
At the end of the day, happiness drives at least most people, and in theory, all (when they make their decisions through careful consideration, and not just to fulfill some role or habit. As we know, this is rare, and in reality, most people can not trace their decisions' motivation to their happiness or anyone's, or to any other consistent value; so I opine).
That sounds like a hidden tautology-by-definition. What is happiness? That which people act to obtain. Why do people act? To obtain happiness. Whatever someone does, you can say after the fact that they did it to make themselves happy.
It is a state of mind. So saying that someone is driven by happiness is not tautological -- it means that they have a perceptually determined utility function.
I think Plastic's got it.
I don't think happiness is defined as whatever people act to obtain. It's something most people fail at with some regularity.
I mean, just look at Elsa, yah?
Er, Elsa? Um, what?
Precisely!
Full of noble desires, and of self-destructive means to achieve them.
Her efforts for happiness are wonderfully demonstrative of the failure systemic to like efforts conceived in ignorance.