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mwengler comments on Could evolution have selected for moral realism? - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: John_Maxwell_IV 27 September 2012 04:25AM

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Comment author: mwengler 04 October 2012 06:33:49PM -1 points [-]

Moral realism is NOT the idea that you can derive moral imperatives from a mixture of moral imperatives and other non-moral assumptions. Moral realism is NOT the idea that if you study humans you can describe "conventional morality," make extensive lists of things that humans tend, sometimes overwhelmingly, to consider wrong.

Moral realism IS the idea that there are things that are actually wrong.

If you are a moral realist, and you provide a mechanism for listing some moral truths, then you pretty much by definition are wrong, immoral, if you do not align your action with those moral truths.

An empirical determination of what are the moral rules of many societies, or most societies, or the moral rules that all societies so far have had in common is NOT an instantiation of a moral realist theory, UNLESS you assert that the rules you are learning about are real, that it is in fact immoral or evil to break them. If you meant something wildly different by "moral attractive sets" than what is incorporated by the idea of where people tend to come down on morality, then please elucidate, otherwise I think for the most part i am working pretty consistently with the attractive set idea in saying these things.

If you think you can be a "moral realist" without agreeing that it is immoral to break or not follow a moral truth, then we are just talking past each other and we might as well stop.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 04 October 2012 07:07:52PM 1 point [-]

Moral realism IS the idea that there are things that are actually wrong.

Okay, yes. I agree with that statement.

If you are a moral realist, and you provide a mechanism for listing some moral truths, then you pretty much by definition are wrong, immoral, if you do not align your action with those moral truths.

Well, I guess we can indeed define an "immoral" person as someone who does morally wrong things; though a more useful definition would probably be to define an immoral person as someone who does them more so than average. So?

If you think you can be a "moral realist" without agreeing that it is immoral to break or not follow a moral truth

It's reasonable to define an action as "immoral" if it breaks or doesn't follow a moral truth.

But how in the word are you connecting these definitions to all your earlier implications about pretending dissenters don't exist, or killing them and then pretending they never existed in the first place?

Fine, lots of people do immoral things. Lots of people are immoral. How does this "is" statement by itself, indicate anything about whether we ought ignore said people, execute them, or hug and kiss them? It doesn't say anything about how we should treat immoral people, or how we should respond to the immoral actions of others.

I'm the moral realist here, but it's you who seem to be deriving specific "ought" statements from my "is" statements.

Comment author: mwengler comment score below threshold [+] (9 children)

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 05 October 2012 11:08:22AM * 1 point [-]

I think the only meaning of moral realism can be that those things which I conclude are morally real can be enforced on others,

A moral statement M might perhaps say: "I ought do X." Agreeing perfectly in the moral universal validity and reality and absolute truth of M still doesn't take you one step closer to "I ought force others to do X.", nor even to "I am allowed to force others to do X.".

Real-life examples might be better:
Surely you can understand that a person might both believe "I oughtn't do drugs" and also "The government oughtn't force me not to do drugs."?
And likewise "I ought give money to charity" is a different proposition than "I ought force others to give money to charity"?

That's just from the libertarian perspective, but even the christian perspective says things like "Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you." it doesn't say "Force others not to curse you, force others not to hurt you". (Christendom largely abandoned that of course once it achieved political power, but that's a different issue...) The pure-pacifist response to violence is likewise pacifism. It isn't "Force pacifism on others".

There's a long history of moral realism that knows how to distinguish between "I ought X" and "I ought force X on others"

"Because the essence of something being immoral is you ARE supposed to do something about it, I would maintain"

The essense of something being immoral is that one oughtn't do it. Just that.

EDIT TO ADD: Heh, just thinking a bit further about it. Let me mathematize what you said a bit. You're effectively thinking of an inference rule which is as follows.

R1: For any statement M(n):"You ought X" present in the morally-real set, the statement M(n+1):"You ought force others to X" is also in the morally real set.

Such a inference rule (which I do not personally accept) would have horrifying repercussions, because of it's infinitely extending capacity. For example by starting with a supposed morally real statement:
M(1): You ought visit your own mother in the hospital.
it'd then go a bit like this.
M(2): You ought force others to visit their mothers in the hospital.
M(3). You ought force others to in turn force others to visit their mothers in the hospital.
...and then...
M(10). You ought establish a vast bureaurcracy of forcing others to establish other bureaucracies in charge of forcing people to visit their mothers in the hospital.
...or even
M(100). Genocide on those who don't believe in vast bureaucracy-establishing bureaucracies!

Heh, I can see why treating R1 as an axiom you find horror in the concept of morally real statements -- you resolve the problem by thinking the morally real set is empty, so that no further such statements can be added. I just don't accept R1 as an axiom at all.

Comment author: mwengler comment score below threshold [+] (7 children)

Comment author: mwengler 05 October 2012 02:33:48PM -3 points [-]

I think you put your hand solidly on the dull end of the stick here. Lets consider some other moral examples whos violation does come up in real life.

1) I ought not steal candy from Walmart, but its OK if you do.
2) I ought not steal the entire $500,000 retirement from someone by defrauding them, but its OK if you want to.
3) I ought not pick a child at random, capture them, hold them prisoner in my house, torture them for my sexual gratification, including a final burst where I dismember them thus killing them painfully and somewhat slowly much to my delight, but its your choice if you want to.
4) Out of consideration, I won't dump toxic wastes over my neighbors stream, but that's just me.

My point is, the class of "victimless crime" types of morality is a tiny subset surrounded by moral hypotheses that directly speak to harms and costs accruing to others. Even libertarians who are against police (relatively extreme) are not against private body guards. These libertarians try to claim that their bodyguards would not be ordered to do anything "wrong" because 1) morality is real and 2) libertarians can figure out what the rules are with sufficient reliabillity and accuracy to be trusted to have their might unilaterally make right.

So that's my point about the philosophical basis of moral realism. Does that mean I would NOT enforce rules against dismembering children or stealing? Absolutely not. What it means is I wouldn't kid myself that the system I supported was the truth and that people that disagreed with me were evil. I would instead examine the rules I was developing in light of what kind of society they would produce. MOST conventional morality survives that test, evolution fine tuned our morality to work pretty economically for smart talkative primates who hunted and gathered in bands of less than a few hundred each.

But the rest of my point about morality not being "real", not being objectively true independent of the state of the species, is that I wouldn't have a fetish about the rightness of some moral conclusion I had reached. I would recognize that 1) we have more resources to spend on morality now than than what with being 100s of times richer than those hunter gatherers, 2) we have a significantly different environment to optimize upon, with the landscape of pervasive and inexpensive information and material items a rather new feature that moral intuitions didn't get to evolve upon.

My point is that morality is an engineering optimization, largely carried out by evolution, but absolutely under significant control of the neocortexes of our species. The moral realists I think will not do as good a job of making up moral systems because they fundamentally miss the point that the thing is plastic and there is in most cases no one "right" answer.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 05 October 2012 02:47:01PM * 1 point [-]

This is getting a bit tiresome.

That I rejected the previously implied inference rule

R1: For any X where "I ought X" it also follows "I ought force others to X",

doesn't mean at all that I have to add a different inference rule

R2: For any X where "I ought X" it also follows "...but it's okay if you don't X."

To be perfectly clear to you: I'm rejecting both R1 and R2 as axioms. I've never stated them as axioms of moral realism, nor have I implied them to be such, nor do I believe that any theory of moral realism requires either of them.

I'm getting a bit tired of refuting implications you keep reading in my comments but which I never made. I suggest you stop reading more into my comment than what I actually write.

Comment author: mwengler comment score below threshold [+] (5 children)

Comment author: mwengler 05 October 2012 03:23:12PM -3 points [-]

If you're tired, you're tired.

Truth isn't about making up axioms and throwing away the ones which are inconvenient to your argument. Rather I propose a program of looking at the world and trying to model it.

How successful do you think a sentient species that has evolved rules that allow it to thrive in significant cooperation but which has not thought to enforce those rules? How common is such a hands-off approach in the successful human societies which surround us in time and space? It is not deductively true that if you believe in morality as real that you will have some truths about enforcing morality on those around you, one way or another. Just as it is not deductively true that all electrons have the same charge or that all healthy humans are conscious and sentient or that shoddily made airplanes tend to crash. But what is the point of a map of the territory that leaves out the mountains surrounding the village for the sake of argument?

It seems to me that your moral realism is trivial. You don't think of morality, it seems to me, as anything other than just another label. Like some things are french others are not,, some are pointillist others are not, and some are moral others are not. Morality like so many other things MEANS something. This meaning has implications for human behavior and human choices.

If you're tired you're tired, but if you care to, let me ask you this. What is the difference between morality being real and morality being a "real label," just a hashtag we attach to statements that use certain words? The difference to me is that if it is just a hashtag, then I don't ought to enforce on myself or others that moral truths, whereas if it is something real, then the statement "people ought not allow innocent children to be kidnapped and tortured" means exactly what it says, we are obliged to do something about it.

Whether you are done or not, thank you for this exchange. I had not been aware that my belief that morality being real meant it ought to be enforced in some way, now I am aware. In my opinion,a moral realism that does not contain some true statements along those lines is an incomplete one at best, or an insincere or vapid one at worst. But at least I leanred not to assume that others talking about morality have this same opinion until I check.

Cheers, Mike

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 05 October 2012 03:39:24PM 1 point [-]

Truth isn't about making up axioms and throwing away the ones which are inconvenient to your argument

What argument? You've never even remotely understood my argument. All this thread has been about trying to explain that I never said those things that you're trying to place in my mouth.

If you want further discussion with me, I suggest you first go back and reread everything I said in the initial comment and only what I said, one more time. and then find a single statement which you think is wrong, and then I'll defend it. I'll defend it by itself, not whatever implications you'll add onto it.

I won't bother responding to anything else you say unless you first do that. I'm not obliged to defend myself against your demonisations of me based on things I never said or implied. Find me one of my statements that you disagree with, not some statement that you need to put to put on my mouth.

Comment author: mwengler 05 October 2012 06:21:51PM -2 points [-]

In your very first post you write:

A possible example for a morally "real" position might e.g. be "You oughtn't decrease everyone's utility in the universe." or "You oughtn't do something which every person equipped with moral instinct in the universe, including yourself, judges you oughtn't do."

If you wish to build a map for a real territory, but ignore that the map doesn't actually follow many details of the territory, it seems fair enough for others who can see the map and the territory to say "this isn't a very good map, it is missing X, Y, and Z." As you rightly point out, it would not make sense to say "it isn't a very good map because it is not internally consistent. The more oversimplified a map is, the more likely it is to be internally consistent.

I like the metaphor of map and territory: morality refers to an observable feature of human life and it is not difficult to look at how it has been practiced and make statements about it on that basis. A system of morality that accepts neither "morality is personal (my morality doesn't apply to others)" nor "Morality is univeral, the point is it applies to everybody" may fit the wonderful metaphor of a very simple axiomatic mathematical system, but in my opinion it is not a map of the human territory of morality.

If you are self-satisfied with an axiomatic system where "moral" is a label that means nothing in real life, then we are talking about different things. If you believe you are proposing a useful map for the human territory called morality, then you must address concerns of "it doesn't seem to really fit that well," and not limit yourself to concerns only of "I said a particular thing that wasn't true."

But if you want to play the axiomatic geometry game, then I do disagree that "You oughtn't do something which every person equipped with moral instinct in the universe, including yourself, judges you oughtn't do." is a good possible morally real statement. First off, its negation, which I take to be "It's OK if you do something which every person equipped with moral instinct in the universe, including yourself, judges you oughtn't do." doesn't seem particularly truer or less true than the statement itself. (And I would hope you can see why I was talking about 99% and 99.99% agreement given your original statement in your original post). Second, if your statement is morally real, objective, "made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion" then please show me how. (The quote is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism )

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 05 October 2012 06:47:17PM * -1 points [-]

tldr; you're overestimating my patience to read your page of text, especially since previous such pages just kept accusing me of various things, and they were all wrong. (edit to add: And now that I went back and read it, this one was no exception accusing me this time of being "self-satisfied with an axiomatic system where "moral" is a label that means nothing in real life" Sorry mate, am no longer bothering to defend against your various, diverse and constantly changing demonisations of me. If I defend against one false accusation, you'll just make up another, and you never update on the fact of how wrong all your previous attempts were.)

But since I scanned to the end to find your actual question:

Second, if your statement is morally real, objective, "made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion" then please show me how

First of all I said my statement "might" be a possible example of something morally real. I didn't argue that it definitely was such. Secondly, it would be made e.g. a possible candidate for being morally real because it include all agents capable of relevant subjective opinion inside it. At that point, it's no longer about subjective opinion, it's about universal opinion. Subjective opinion indicates something that changes from subject to subject. If it's the same for all subjects, it's no longer really subjective.

And I would hope you can see why I was talking about 99% and 99.99%

No, I don't see why. The very fact that my hypothetical statements specified "everyone" and you kept talking about what to do about the remainder was more like evidence to me that you weren't really addressing my points and possibly hadn't even read them.

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mwengler comments on Could evolution have selected for moral realism? - Less Wrong Discussion

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