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drethelin comments on Less Wrong views on morality? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I believe in objective relative moralities.
What does believing that entail?
I think different intelligent entities will have different values, but that it's objectively possible to determine what these are and what actions are correct for which ones. I also think most people's stated values are only an approximation of their actual values.
I agree that it is possible to figure out an agent's terminal values by observing their behavior and such, but I don't understand what work the word "objectively" is doing in that sentence.
Most people, as this thread has exhibited, don't understand what the word means or at least not what it means in phases like "objective moral facts".
Given the amount of discussion of applied-morality concepts like Friendliness and CEV, I had higher expectations.
Basically it means that even though moralities may be subjective I think statements like "that's wrong" or "that's the right thing to do" are useful, even if at base meaningless.
The idea that a meaningless statement can be useful represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what the word "meaningless" means.
If a statement is useful, it must have meaning, or else there would be nothing there to use.
I think he means "don't refer to anything" rather than "meaningless".
"Objective" means "mind-independent" so if you're looking at someone's mind to determine those values they're, by definition, subjective. When we use the words "objective" and "subjective" in meta-ethics we're almost always using them in this way and now questioning, say, whether or not there are objective facts about other people's minds.
If "objective" is "mind independent", then are facts ABOUT minds not objective? We cannot have a science that discusses, for example, how the pre-frontal lobe functions because no such claim can be mind-independent?
For every so-called subjective statement, there is an objective statement that says exactly the same thing from a different point of view. If I say, "spinich, yumm" there is a corresponding objective statement "Alonzo likes spinich" that says exactly the same thing.
So, why not just focus on the objective equivalent of every subjective statement? Why pretend that there is a difference that makes any difference?
Because it makes a huge difference in our understanding of morality. "Alonzo expresses a strong distaste for murder" is a very different fact than "Murder is immoral" (as commonly understood), no?
ETA: Of course, given that I don't think facts like "murder is immoral" exist I'm all about focusing on the other kind of fact. But it's important to get concepts and categories straight because those two facts are not necessarily intensionally or extensionally equivalent.
Yes. Water is made up of two hydrogen and an oxygern atom is a different fact than the earth and venus are nearly the same size. It does not bring science to its knees.
And the next time someone says that there are astronomical facts about the chemical make-up of water I will correct them as well. Which is to say I don't know what your point is and can only imagine you think I am arguing for something I am not. Perhaps it's worth clarifying things before we get glib?
In which case, you will be making a point - not that there are different facts, but that there are different languages. Of course, language is an invention - and there is no natural law that dictates the definition of the word "astronomy".
It is merely a convention that we have adopted a language in which the term "astronomy" does not cover chemical facts. But we could have selected a different language - and there is no law of nature dictating that we could not.
And, yet, these facts about language - these facts about the ways we define our terms - does not cause science to fall to its knees either.
So, what are you talking about? Are you talking about morality, or are you talking about "morality"?
I suppose that is true... but surely that doesn't render the word meaningless? In the actual world where words mean the things they mean and not other things that they could have meant in a world with different linguistic convention "astronomy" still means something like "the study of celestial bodies", right? Surely people asking for astronomical facts about airplanes, as if they were celestial bodies is a sign of confusion and ought to be gently corrected, no?
Where in the world did you get the notion that I wanted science on its knees or that I thought it was? I'm as kinky as the next guy but I quite like science where it is. I'm completely bamboozled by this rhetoric. Do you take me for someone who believes God is required for morality or some other such nonsense? If so let me be clear: moral judgments are neither natural nor supernatura objectivel facts. They are the projection of an individuals preferences and emotions that people mistake for externally existing things, much as people mistake cuteness as an intrinsic property of babies when in fact it is simply the projection of our affinity for babies that makes them appear cute-to-us. That does not mean that there are not facts about moral judgments or that science is not on strong and worthy grounds when gathering such facts.
My chief concern in my initial comment to which you replied was getting everyone straight on what the meta-ethical terminology means. People enjoy freelancing with the meanings of words like "objective", "subjective", and "relative" and it creates a terrible mess when talking about metaethics because no one know what anyone else is talking about. I didn't have any kind of straightforward factual disagreement with the original commenter, bracketing the fact that I was quite sure what their position was and if they in fact thought they had succeeded in solve a two-thousand old debate by discovering and objective foundation for morality when they had in fact just rediscovered moral subjectivism with some choice bits of ev-psych thrown in. Note that hankx7787, at least, does seem to think Sam Harris has found an objective and scientific foundation for morality, so it seems this blustering isn't all semantics. Maybe words have meanings after all.
I think the fact that astronomy means astronomy and not chemistry among rational conversationalists is as significant as the fact that the chess piece that looks sort of like a horse is the one rational chess players use as the knight.
I don't think there is anything particularly significant in almost all labels, they're positive use is that you can manipulate concepts and report on your results to others using them.
Does an ontologically privileged transcendental God count as a mind? 'Cuz you'd think meta-ethical theism counts as belief in objective moral truths. So presumably "mind-independent" means something like "person-mind-or-finite-mind-independent"?
Divine command theories of morality are often called "theological subjectivism". That's another example of a universal but subjective theory. But, say, Thomist moral theory is objectivist (assuming I understand it right).
THat's funny, the wikipedia article listed 'most religiously based moral theories' as examples of moral realism.
Most religiously based moral theories aren't divine command theory, as far as I know.
Not quite, I don't think. If you are looking at different well-functioning well-informed minds to get the truth value of a statement, and you get different results from different minds, then the statement is subjective. If you can "prove" that all well-functioining well-informed minds would give you the same result, then you have "proved" that the statement is objective.
In principle I could look at the mind of a good physicist to determine whether electrons repel each other, and the fact that my method for making the determination was to look at someone's mind would not be enough to change the statement "electrons repel each other" into a subjective statement.
It's not about the method of discovery but truth-making features. You could look at the mind of a good physicist to determine whether electrons repel each other but that's not what makes "electrons repel each others" true. In contrast, what makes a moral judgment true according to subjectivism is the attitudes of the person who makes the moral judgment.
This is exactly what I mean.