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EricHerboso comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong Discussion
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Can you please rephrase this to "moral skepticism"? Or is there some benefit to saying it in the way you have?
Note that moral skepticism does not necessarily equate to nihilism -- error theories, fictionist accounts and moral revisionism all talk about doing what others would call "the right thing", even though they are all moral skeptic theories.
Also, don't you think this section is a bit coarsely defined? I'd love to see a breakdown of moral skeptics categorized as revisionists, fictionists, etc. You can always include an "general moral skeptic" option for those people that stop thinking about metaethics once they decide moral skepticism is correct. Similarly, I'd love to see more finely grained options under consequentialism and the other broad categories of this section.
I'd just rename the fourth answer to "None of the above". And, while I'm at it, I'd replace “MOST identify” with “accept or most strongly lean towards”.
Lumping moral skepticism in "none of the above" seems very inappropriate to me. I know that technically, if the others cover all the moral realist bases (which I agree that it does), then "none of the above" is linguistically correct and has moral skepticism as its referent.
But it seems dismissive to call it "none of the above". It feels to me like describing it that way has semantic content embedded in the phrasing of the question that I disagree with.
I would prefer "moral skepticism" as an option for the same reason I'd prefer "atheism" as an option under the religious question. Calling it "none of the above" might be formally accurate, but it nevertheless feels inappropriate to phrase it that way, as it makes the question itself feel biased.
To tell the truth, the main reason why I wanted “None of the above” is that I wasn't terribly sure that the four answers in the last survey are a strictly valid tetrachotomy.