poke comments on Is Morality Given? - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 July 2008 08:12AM

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Comment author: poke 06 July 2008 06:14:43PM 1 point [-]

If somebody said to me "morality is just what we do." If they presented evidence that the whole apparatus of their moral philosophy was a coherent description of some subset of human psychology and sociology. Then that would be enough for me. It's just a description of a physical system. Human morality would be what human animals do. Moral responsibility wouldn't be problematic; moral responsibility could be as physical as gravity if it were psychologically and sociologically real. "I have a moral responsibility" would be akin to "I can lift 200 lbs." The brain is complicated, sure, but so are muscles and bones and motor control. That wouldn't make it a preference or a mere want either. That's probably where we're headed. But I don't think metaethics is the interesting problem. The deeper problem is, I think, the empirical one: Do humans really display this sort of morality?