There seems to be some division on this point.

I might be mistaken but I got the feeling that there's not much of a division, the picture I've got of LW on meta-ethics is something along the lines of: values exist in peoples heads, those are real, but if there were no people there wouldn't be any values. Values are to some extent universal, since most people care about similar things, this makes some values behave as if they were objective. If you want to categories - though I don't know what you would get out of it, it's a form of nihilism.

An appropriate question when discussing objective and subjective morality is:

• What would an objective morality look like? VS a subjective one?

After reading lots of debates on these topics, I'm no longer sure what the terms mean. Is a paperclip maximizer a "moral nihilist"? If yes, then so am I. Same for no.

Morality is a human behavior. It is in some ways analogous to trade or language: a structured social behavior that has developed in a way that often approximates particular mathematical patterns.

All of these can be investigated both empirically and intellectually: you can go out and record what people actually do, and draw conclusions from it; or you can reason from first principles about what sorts of patterns are mathematically possible; or both. For instance, you could investigate trade either beginning from the histories of actual markets, or from principles of microeconomics. You could investigate language beginning from linguistic corpora and historical linguistics ("What sorts of language do people actually use? How do they use it?"); or from formal language theory, parsing, generative grammar, etc. ("What sorts of language are possible?")

Some of the intellectual investigation of possible moralities we call "game theory"; others, somewhat less mathematical but more checked against moral intuition, "metaethics".

Asking whether there are universal, objective moral principles is a little like asking whether there are universal, objective p... (read more)

In summary of my own current position (and which I keep wanting to make a fuller post thereof):

If factual reality F can represent a function F(M) -> M from moral instructions to moral instructions (e.g. given the fact that burning people hurts them, F("it's wrong to hurt people")-> "It's wrong to burn people"), then there may exist universal moral attractors for our given reality -- these would represent objective moralities that are true for a vast set of different moral starting positions. Much like you reach the Sierpinski T... (read more)

I'm just wondering if you have read the metaethics sequence.

There seems to be some confusion - when I say "an objective morality capable of being scientifically investigated (a la Sam Harris or others)" - I do NOT mean something like a "one true, universal, metaphysical morality for all mind-designs" like the Socratic/Platonic Form of Good or any such nonsense. I just mean something in reality that's mind-independent - in the sense that it is hard-wired, e.g. by evolution, and thus independent/prior to any later knowledge or cognitive content - and thus can be investigated scientifically. It is

There seems to be some confusion - when I say "an objective morality capable of being scientifically investigated (a la Sam Harris or others)" - I do NOT mean something like a "one true, universal, metaphysical morality for all mind-designs" like the Socratic/Platonic Form of Good or any such nonsense. I just mean something in reality that's mind-independent - in the sense that it is hard-wired, e.g. by evolution, and thus independent/prior to any later knowledge or cognitive content - and thus can be investigated scientifically

I thi... (read more)

If Euthyphro's dilemma proves religious morality to be false, it also does the same to evolutionary morality: http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2009/02/euthyphro-and-evolutionary-ethics.html

Well, an awful lot of what we think of as morality is dictated, ultimately, by game theory. Which is pretty universal, as far as I can tell. Rational-as-in-winning agents will tend to favor tit-for-tat strategies, from which much of morality can be systematically derived.

I believe in objective relative moralities.

I suspect that there exists an objective morality capable of being investigated, but not using the methods commonly known as science.

What we currently think of as objective knowledge comes from one of two methods:

1) Start with self-evident axioms and apply logical rules of inference. The knowledge obtained from this method is called "mathematics".

2) The method commonly called the "scientific method". Note that thanks to the problem of induction the knowledge obtained using this method can never satisfy method 1's criterion for knowled... (read more)

Until a few days ago I would have said I'm a nihilist, even though a few days ago I didn't know that was the label for someone who didn't believe that moral statements could be objective facts.

Now I would say a hearty "I don't know" and assign almost a 50:50 chance that there are objective moral "ought" statements.

Then in the last few days I was reminded that 1) scientific "objective facts" are generally dependent on unprovable assumptions, like the utiliity of induction, and the idea that what a few electrons did last thu... (read more)

Natural selection favours some moralities more than other. The ones we see are those that thrive. Moral relativism mostly appears to ignore such effects.

I do not like the word "morality". It is very ambiguously defined. The only version of morality that I even remotely agree with is consequentialism/utilitarianism. I can't find compelling arguments for why other people should think this way though, and I think morality ultimately comes down to people arguing about their different terminal values, which is always pointless.