Followup to: The Bedrock of Fairness
Discussions of morality seem to me to often end up turning around two different intuitions, which I might label morality-as-preference and morality-as-given. The former crowd tends to equate morality with what people want; the latter to regard morality as something you can't change by changing people.
As for me, I have my own notions, which I am working up to presenting. But above all, I try to avoid avoiding difficult questions. Here are what I see as (some of) the difficult questions for the two intuitions:
- For morality-as-preference:
- Why do people seem to mean different things by "I want the pie" and "It is right that I should get the pie"? Why are the two propositions argued in different ways?
- When and why do people change their terminal values? Do the concepts of "moral error" and "moral progress" have referents? Why would anyone want to change what they want?
- Why and how does anyone ever "do something they know they shouldn't", or "want something they know is wrong"? Does the notion of morality-as-preference really add up to moral normality?
- For morality-as-given:
- Would it be possible for everyone in the world to be wrong about morality, and wrong about how to update their beliefs about morality, and wrong about how to choose between metamoralities, etcetera? So that there would be a morality, but it would be entirely outside our frame of reference? What distinguishes this state of affairs, from finding a random stone tablet showing the words "You should commit suicide"?
- How does a world in which a moral proposition is true, differ from a world in which that moral proposition is false? If the answer is "no", how does anyone perceive moral givens?
- Is it better for people to be happy than sad? If so, why does morality look amazingly like godshatter of natural selection?
- Am I not allowed to construct an alien mind that evaluates morality differently? What will stop me from doing so?
Part of The Metaethics Sequence
Next post: "Is Morality Preference?"
Previous post: "The Bedrock of Fairness"
Is it ok to mash the two options together? I'd take the position that morality is about what people want, but that since it is about something that is real (wants) and thus objective/quantifiable/etc you can make statements about these real things that are actually true or false and not subject to whims.
To take a stab at a few of these...
Some terminal values can't be changed (or only very slightly), they are the ones we are born with. Aversion to pain, desire for sex, etc. The more maleable ones that can be changed are never changed through logic or reasoning. They are changed through things like praise, rewards, condemnation, punishments. I'm not sure if it's possible for people to change their own maleable terminal values. But people can change other's maleable terminal values (and likewise, have their own terminal values changed by others) through such methods. Obviously this is much easier to do very early in life.
I'd also like to propose that all terminal values can also be viewed as instrumental values on their tendency to help fulfill or prevent the realization of other values. "Staying alive", for example.
Moral progress is made by empirical observation of what desires/aversions have the greatest tendency to fulfill other desires, and then by strengthening these by the social tools mentioned above.
You can very easily want to change your desires when several of your desires are in conflict. I have a desire to inhale nicotine, and a desire to not get lung cancer, and I realize these two are at odds. I'd much prefer to not have the first desire. If one of your wants has significant consequences (loss of friends, shunning by your family) then you often would really like that want to change.
"Doing something they shouldn't" or "wanting something they know is wrong" are demonstrations of the fact that all entities have many desires, and sometimes these desires are in conflict. A husband might want to have an extra-marital affair due to a desire for multiple sexual partners, and yet "know it's wrong" due to an aversion to hurting his wife, or losing his social status, or alienating his children, or various other reasons.
Am I not allowed to construct an alien mind that evaluates morality differently? What will stop me from doing so?
Can you elaborate on this? You seem to be using "allowed" in a strange way. If you have the means to do this, and others lack the means to physically restrain you from doing so, then the only thing that would stop you would be your own desires and aversions.