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"
Why do people seem to mean different things by "I want the pie" and "It is right that I should get the pie"?
These really are different statements. "I am entitled to fraction x of the pie" means more or less the same as "a fair judge would assign me fraction x of the pie".
But a fair judge just means the judge has no personal relationship with any of the disputing parties and makes his decision based on some rational process, not arbitrarily. It isn't necessarily true that there's a unique solution that a fair judge would decide upon. One could say that whoever saw it first or touched it first is entitled to the whole pie, or that it should be divided strictly equally, or that it be divided on a need-based or merit-based, or he could even make the gods must be crazy/idiocy of Solomon solution and say it's better that the pie be destroyed than allowed to exist as a source of dissent. In my (admittedly spotty) knowledge of anthropology, in most traditional pie-gathering societies, if three members of a tribe found a particularly large and choice pie they would be expected to share it with the rest of the tribe, but they would have a great deal of discretion as to how the pie was divided, they'd keep most of it for themselves and their allies.
This is not to say that morality is nothing but arbitrary social convention. Some sets of rules will lead to outcomes that nearly everyone would agree are better than others. But there's no particular reason to believe that there could be rules that everyone will agree on, particularly not if they have to agree on those rules after the fact.