the possibility remains open that there can exist universal moral attractive fixed sets, deriving entirely from such "is" transformations, regardless of the opening person-specific or species-specific moral set,
So you've got these attractive sets and maybe 90% or 99% or 99.9% or 99.99% of humans or humans plus some broader category of conscious/intelligent entities agree. What to do about the exceptions? Pretend they don't exist? Kill them because they are different and then pretend they never existed or couldn't exist? In my opinion, what you have as a fact is that 99.999% of humans agree X is wrong and .001% don't. The question of moral realism is not a factual one, it is a question of choice: do you CHOOSE to declare what 99.999% have an intuition towards as binding on the .001% that don't, or do you CHOOSE to believe that the facts are that the various intuitions have prevalences, some higher than others, some very high indeed, and that's all you actually KNOW.
I effectively feel bound by a lot of my moral intuitions, that is more or less a fact. As near as I can tell, my moral intuitions evolved as part of the social development of animals, then mammals, then primates, then homo. It is rational to assume that the mix of moral intuitions is fairly fine-tuned to optimize the social contribution to our species fitness, and it is more or less a condensation of facts to say that the social contribution to our fitness is larger than the social contribution to any other species on the planet to their fitness.
So I accept that human moral intuition is an organ like the brain or the islets of langerhans. I accept that a fair amount can be said about how the islets of langerhans function, and how the brain functions, when things are going well. Also, we know a lot about how the islets of langerhans and how the brain function when things are apparently not going so well, diseases one might say. I'd even go so far as to say I would prefer to live in a society dominated by people without diabetes and who are not sociopaths (people who seem to lack many common moral intuitions). I'd go so far as to say I would support policies including killing sociopaths and their minions, and including spending only a finite amount of resources on more expensive non-killing ways of dealing with sociopaths and diabetics.
But it is hard for me to accept that it is rational to fall in to the system instead of seeing it from outside. For me to conclude that my moral intuitions are objectively real like the charge on an electron of the electronic properties of doped silicon is projection, seems to me. It is identical to my concluding that one mammal is beautiful and sexy and another is dull, when it is really the triggering of an evolved sexual mechanism in me that paints the one mammal one way and the other the more boring way. If it is more accurate to understand that the fact that I am attracted to one mammal is not because she is objectively more beautiful than another, then it is more accurate to say that the fact that I have a moral intuition is not because I am plugged in to some moral fact of the universe, and not because of an evolved reaction I have. The fact that most men or many men find woman A beautiful and woman B to be blah doesn't mean that all men ought to find A beautiful and B blah, any more than the fact that many (modern) men feel slavery is wrong means they are not projecting their social construct into a realm of fact which could fruitfully be held to a higher standard.
Indeed, the fact that believing that our social constructs, our political truths, are REAL truths is clearly adaptive in the social species. Societies that encourage strong identifications with the values of the society are robust. Societies in which it is right to kill the apostates because they are wrong, evil, have a staying power. But my life as a scientist has consisted of my understanding that my wanting something to be true is not ANY evidence for its truth. I bring that to my American humanity. So even though I will support the killing of our enemies, I don't think that it is a FACT that it is right to kill the enemies of America any more than it is a FACT that it is right to kill the enemies of Islam.
So you've got these attractive sets and maybe 90% or 99% or 99.9% or 99.99% of humans or humans plus some broader category of conscious/intelligent entities agree. What to do about the exceptions? Pretend they don't exist?
What does agreement have to do with anything? Anyway such moral attractive sets either include an injuction of what to do with people that disagree with them or they don't. And even if they do have such moral injuctions, it still doesn't mean that my preferences would necessarily be to follow said injuctions.
People aren't physically f...
I was surprised to see the high number of moral realists on Less Wrong, so I thought I would bring up a (probably unoriginal) point that occurred to me a while ago.
Let's say that all your thoughts either seem factual or fictional. Memories seem factual, stories seem fictional. Dreams seem factual, daydreams seem fictional (though they might seem factual if you're a compulsive fantasizer). Although the things that seem factual match up reasonably well to the things that actually are factional, this isn't the case axiomatically. If deviating from this pattern is adaptive, evolution will select for it. This could result in situations like: the rule that pieces move diagonally in checkers seems fictional, while the rule that you can't kill people seems factual, even though they're both just conventions. (Yes, the rule that you can't kill people is a very good convention, and it makes sense to have heavy default punishments for breaking it. But I don't think it's different in kind from the rule that you must move diagonally in checkers.)
I'm not an expert, but it definitely seems as though this could actually be the case. Humans are fairly conformist social animals, and it seems plausible that evolution would've selected for taking the rules seriously, even if it meant using the fact-processing system for things that were really just conventions.
Another spin on this: We could see philosophy as the discipline of measuring, collating, and making internally consistent our intuitions on various philosophical issues. Katja Grace has suggested that the measurement of philosophical intuitions may be corrupted by the desire to signal on the part of the philosophy enthusiasts. Could evolutionary pressure be an additional source of corruption? Taking this idea even further, what do our intuitions amount to at all aside from a composite of evolved and encultured notions? If we're talking about a question of fact, one can overcome evolution/enculturation by improving one's model of the world, performing experiments, etc. (I was encultured to believe in God by my parents. God didn't drop proverbial bowling balls from the sky when I prayed for them, so I eventually noticed the contradiction in my model and deconverted. It wasn't trivial--there was a high degree of enculturation to overcome.) But if the question has no basis in fact, like the question of whether morals are "real", then genes and enculturation will wholly determine your answer to it. Right?
Yes, you can think about your moral intuitions, weigh them against each other, and make them internally consistent. But this is kind of like trying to add resolution back in to an extremely pixelated photo--just because it's no longer obviously "wrong" doesn't guarantee that it's "right". And there's the possibility of path-dependence--the parts of the photo you try to improve initially could have a very significant effect on the final product. Even if you think you're willing to discard your initial philosophical conclusions, there's still the possibility of accidentally destroying your initial intuitional data or enculturing yourself with your early results.
To avoid this possibility of path-dependence, you could carefully document your initial intuitions, pursue lots of different paths to making them consistent in parallel, and maybe even choose a "best match". But it's not obvious to me that your initial mix of evolved and encultured values even deserves this preferential treatment.
Currently, I disagree with what seems to be the prevailing view on Less Wrong that achieving a Really Good Consistent Match for our morality is Really Darn Important. I'm not sure that randomness from evolution and enculturation should be treated differently from random factors in the intuition-squaring process. It's randomness all the way through either way, right? The main reason "bad" consistent matches are considered so "bad", I suspect, is that they engender cognitive dissonance (e.g. maybe my current ethics says I should hack Osama Bin Laden to death in his sleep with a knife if I get the chance, but this is an extremely bad match for my evolved/encultured intuitions, so I experience a ton of cognitive dissonance actually doing this). But cognitive dissonance seems to me like just another aversive experience to factor in to my utility calculations.
Now that you've read this, maybe your intuition has changed and you're a moral anti-realist. But in what sense has your intuition "improved" or become more accurate?
I really have zero expertise on any of this, so if you have relevant links please share them. But also, who's to say that matters? In what sense could philosophers have "better" philosophical intuition? The only way I can think of for theirs to be "better" is if they've seen a larger part of the landscape of philosophical questions, and are therefore better equipped to build consistent philosophical models (example).